I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?

Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.

What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.

It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.

I think the part that stands out is how at least one court went out of its way to invent a new argument on behalf of the museum. I was surprised to learn this is actually somewhat common in French law. The court itself, at least with cases involving administrative actions, has every right to step in like this. It is not a neutral arbiter.

Is the museum supposed to have such a monopoly? Because then the ruling would be disappointing but ultimately not incoherent.

What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?

TFA discusses this in depth—and that the end ruling (according to the article) was haphazard, inconsistent, and indefensible.

> Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.

You're badly confused. The scans are not a financial asset, and they don't even try to make money on them.

From Cosmo Wenman's earlier exploits:

> In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws

> The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.

> In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."

> I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.

> I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.

> SPK's response, five months later, was revealing.

> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so.

( https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-... )

You're quoting an article about a German museum. This is a different museum in France. You can't assume they have anything in common.

All the public evidence suggests that museums make less from digital rights than the cost of running the schemes

Just because they don't make much money doesn't mean they want to just give stuff away.

And just because the museum wants something doesn't mean the rest of society has to let them.

No, but the courts seem to agree with them.

The fact that another museum tried to avoid giving out scans because the museum felt it would impact their gift shop sales supports the parent's claim about the museum's motivations, not refutes it.

Did you read the quotes? They tried to avoid giving out scans by saying that they felt it would impact their gift shop sales. But we know that they were lying about this, because they had no gift shop sales to impact.

  >reclassified point clouds as non-document materialast

Someone needs to make "FOI-B-Gone," an app that bidirectionally converts arbitrary PDFs into one of these (apparently) magically un-FOI-able point cloud documents.

Just "emboss" the text into 3D space, write that to a 3D file, and voila no more pesky fourth estate oversight! Watergate, eat your heart out...

Couldn’t you argue a bitmap is a “point cloud” in 2D space?

France said 3D point clouds are magic, and they don't extend that to bitmaps. France works in mysterious ways!

If that's how France feels, we can give them 3D point cloud files.

So, just add a 0 z-coordinate. And fwiw, points are usually represented on a computer with a 4D position, not a 3D one. So; if they specify "3D" then point clouds likely aren't covered.

Standard point clouds files are magic, standard bitmap files aren't! I don't make the rules, France does.

Of course it doesn't make any sense. We're engineering for (particularly inane) legal requirements, not information theoretic ones.

However, if The Rules are somehow that industry standard point cloud files are un-FOI-able, then any file can be made un-FOI-able, because any file can be translated to/from a standard point cloud file.

After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.

It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....

I would go as far as to say the museum was negligent (by their own admission) and lazy, assuming (rightly so) the judicial system would protect them. Wild stuff.

IMO, their collected filings, both in the Paris tribunal and in the Conseil d'État, are a true trainwreck. I don't discount the possibility that they were lazy (it seems likely) but I also think they may be truly incompetent and genuinely indifferent to the law, and without a doubt they behaved and argued in bad faith throughout.

Because they are snobby gatekeepers who think making art more accessible would dilute their value. These sorts are very common in the art and academia world.

Or because they are ignorant, scared and facing a technological disruption that might threaten the value of the original, which is the very reason the museum exists. You get a similar dynamic with over-enthusiastic corporate takedown notices.

I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.

It sounds like there were two different factions within the museum: one which intended to scan all the works and put 2D and 3D scans and models online, and one which did not want any scans to be released. The grants were obtained by Group A; Group B seems to have veto power.

Or more likely because they make money from selling small replicas of the sculptures in the museum store, and don't want to undercut that by making it trivial for everyone in the world to 3d print their own.

Maybe it’s about the precedent and the government didn’t want to have to publish raw data on everything they have so they made sure to win this one?

Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…

I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.

Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.

There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.

My guess is that citizen's freedom (of information) places a compulsion (of fulfillment) on the body being summoned, and our natural inclination has always been to resist being compelled.

It may have been a mistake to phrase the FOIA process to the affected bodies as "you must share" rather than "you now have the tools and process to share".

They already had the tools to share before FOIA processes were implemented and too often chose not to share back then too. That's why we have FOI acts in the first place. Seems more like these neede to be better enforced and backed up with negative consequences to those that try to fight them.

One of my first real interactions with a public body was filing a FOI request to a local council. I'm still a little shocked that they made me fight it all the way to the regulator.

I think it harms the ego of the government workers to think they are effectively of lower status than a random citizen who can ask for them to account for themselves

I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.

I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here

I had the same experience. Museums really want to keep the pictures locked up. Profit and ego

I wonder if this will change now that camera-enabled glasses are becoming more common.

> I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

I doubt it. How much merchandise relies on high quality 3D scans?

I think the real reason is that a lot of people are naturally paranoid control freaks. Their instinct is that these scans should be secret and they never really think beyond that.

>I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise

Weird that anyone would care, since most of those works are presumably public domain. Is it not the legal right, in most of the Western world, of the public to reproduce such works, let alone to use them as elements in their own work?

Yeah, it would probably be legal to take a picture in the museum and make merchandise, but the museum isn't going to actively help you by giving you a scan.

Well, that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? The museum has possession of the scans, but do they - should they - own them? Or are they resources that the public has a right to access?

Are you saying the scans are public domain? I thought it was about the picture or sculpture itself.

I don’t think every work done by a state controlled entity is automatically public domain, right?

If the scans were enabled by public funding, the public should have a right to access them, short of extenuating circumstances, like security concerns with the military (but that shouldn't be the default; it should be something they have to justify).

The exceptional Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum: "We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have, are, in a way, everyone’s property… With the internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image from the Rijksmueum rather than using a very bad reproduction… If they want to have a Vermeer on their toilet paper, I’d rather have a very high-quality image of Vermeer on toilet paper than a very bad reproduction."

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-...

I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.

A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.

I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.

Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.

Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.

This is not even rare or just in niche professions - this is everywhere, and perhaps even the default if not actively fought. I always found it dishonourable myopic.

Nietzsche said that the priests are the enemies, and I'm starting to think he was on to something.

In the museum case, the preservation role is explicitely asked for. It is one of official reasons for muaeum existence.

And in natural history museums their primary purpose isn't to show little Jimmy a T. rex skeleton but to preserve the fossils and other specimens for scientific research.

If that was true, there wouldn’t be a museum.

It would be a warehouse without public access.

A lot of them have the majority of their collections offsite in warehouses. The "museum" is a sort of front office meant for visitors, but visitors only ever see a tiny fraction of the collection.

"A museum" is already a lot more than visitors can see. As stated they generally only show a tiny fraction of their collections and besides that many museums employ dozens of full time researchers who use the collections to do analyses and publish papers. It is as prestigious to be faculty at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, or the Smithsonian in DC as it is at a major university. But without visitors it is hard to bring in money either directly or indirectly.

Not exactly. If this was the sole goal then there wouldn’t be a museum at all.

The museum literally exists because they’re expected to display some things.

The preservationists who fight against showing anything wish the museum part didn’t exist. They want it all to be a big warehouse where nobody can see anything.

Then why scan them in the first place?

The museum's purpose is to preserve the artwork and scanning it furthers that purpose.

Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.

Surely their purpose is both? I haven’t read the specific stipulations Rodin put on this museum he founded but I assume he didn’t mean for them to not display his works.

I suppose I don’t think a lot on museums and their operation.

Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).

The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.

FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.

I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”

More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.

I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.

I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.

That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.

However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.

> Then why scan them in the first place?

Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.

At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.

Imo there’s a significant historical benefit in having a “snapshot” of a piece. It could degrade, be preserved incorrectly, be moved incorrectly and broken minorly or majorly. In any case you can go back in time to at verify what it’s state was then.

There's even more historical benefit to publishing that snapshot widely so that when you need it you don't have to find out that the cabinet it was stored in was mistakenly thrown out decadeds ago.

Excerpts from the museum's applications to the Ministry of Culture, seeking public funds for scanning its collection, statements that it reiterated over several years of renewed funding requests:

"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."

Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"

(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)

It’s not a totally crazy idea to insist that certain artworks should only be viewed in certain ways. I’m reminded of David Lynch saying something similar about watching movies on your phone:

https://youtu.be/OQiQk8AJ0YI?is=Wiwxeok0Hg4jMdJu

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)

So in other words, some art necessarily has a physical dimension which cannot be appreciated in a non-physical way.

It is a crazy idea when they’re not your work in the first place. David Lynch made his movies. The museum didn’t make the sculptures.

Rodin has been dead for a long time, and the museum is obviously the closest thing to his representative. He specifically donated the buildings and his work to the French state on the condition that they make it a museum of his work.

Lynch also wasn’t talking about only his movies, he was talking about cinema as a whole.

VR?

I mean, the museum setting is an arbitrary middle ground between the initial intended presentation (a 19th century salon or 20th century gallery showing, in specific physical spaces, likely to be attended by specific people) and wherever and at whatever fidelity that initial presentation is reproduced. What's impure enough to be verboten? No thumbnails in museum brochures or online? Do we restrict entrance to the demographic that was initially present? Are we allowed to light them with modern fixtures? Must the air in the gallery be a reproduction of Paris or New York's historical smog?

An artist's intent should be respected, sure, but I do wonder how much of it is that, and how much of it is a sort of elitism and gatekeeping from people who are not the artist.

I don't think it's that complicated. The museum wants people to see the original works in the museum.

The rest of what you wrote is unnecessarily pedantic.

I kind of don't care what "the museum" wants, though. They're stewards, not owners.

Musée Rodin, 2010-2013: "The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

> I’m reminded of David Lynch saying something similar about watching movies on your phone

I'm not aware that Lynch has actively taken any measures to prevent people from viewing his movies on a phone. Giving recommendations is very different from enforcing your views on others. The guy also made a TV series to criticize television btw - I could see him doing the same with phones if he was still around instead of trying to prevent people from viewing his art on their phones.

> Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a few artists whose works are somewhat belittled by being digitized and viewed on a screen: Monet and Rothko. Both have monumental size paintings that really don’t work if you aren’t there in person. But since the only way most people interact with them is via a screen, they are often criticized (Rothko specifically.)

Oh please, minimalist art is not just being criticized because people view it on screens but because simply not everyone views it as all that impressive. A giant turd is still a turd after all.

I’m curious for your thoughts on my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955346

It seems to me that the scans are documents.

It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.

Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.

Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.

So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.

Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.

https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...

You should see Pixal3D. You don't even need a time-of-flight laser anymore. Images are enough. In fact, this sort of thing + image generation, and soon video generation, have lead to workflows that result in both 3D and 4D (time series 3D) gaussian splats.

From my perspective, having high resolution scans or even 3D scans could undermine the role of the museums. Their role is to provide the best environment to view, to experience and to appreciate the works of the artists. A casual viewing at home, from a computer cannot provide that optimal experience and almost certainly will reduce the wish to visit the museum in person. Much like a recording of a concert or an opera cannot replace a in-person experience but (unfortunately?) is the default way for pop music. Much of that experience is how we mentally, emotionally and physically prepared ourselves for the experience.

Museums want to prevent that and also ensure their own existence.

PS: in this specific case, the museum has to worry about counterfeit copies of Rodin works as well. But I don’t want to succulents on that as I don’t know the details.

Musée Rodin, 2010-2013: "The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."

Nicely summarized by another commentator:

“FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.

If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.”

To put it differently, imagine the museum trained a RodinGPT on artworks and other data. The activist now bases his claim to the model on the fact that the model is a document.

The other commenter didn't answer any of the pertinent questions, namely, on which legal document they based their answer on what a "document" is and isn't. And one of the replies [1] points out to a possibly relevant EU directive against that point.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but saying "FOI is not meant for that" is the type of answer that requires some solid evidence that the other comment didn't provide.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49951807

Re: what "FOI is for": see my previous comment above excerpting from FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN FRANCE, LAW AND PRACTICE

Re: a hypothetical LLM: French FOI law covers all document formats. The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents produced by the government in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public.

So, if the French government produced an LLM and front end then, yes, that LLM model and its front end would be an administrative document, in principle communicable to the public. To me that does not seem improper or difficult or strange to imagine.

This discussion doesn’t make sense without looking at the actual French law. Just saying that the scans shouldn’t count as a document because it would lead to weird edge cases doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t be applied as written. You can’t just not apply active laws because you don’t like the outcome in a state where people are suppose to trust the law.

If you know french bureaucracy, it is very simple in the end. It is a public worker that is nominated as the head of the museum. The mindset is almost never to do their job well or benefit the common good. But to be important and showing your importance by abusing your power if necessary to show that you have some.

Somehow he thinks that the sculpture is his own as he is the custodian, and so that he has all rights. And pictures or 3d scans in the end belongs to him also, like if the virtual thing was a physical item locked in the museum.

If he is forced to release publicly the 3d scan, especially against his goodwill, it is like being striped of his power and authority so he couldn't allow that. It becomes a personal matter.

The only thing that could have worked is to befriend him or create a cultural organisation and have lobbied to him in the first place that he would learned a lot of reputation/marketing points by releasing it. Imagine a dedicated website and grand champagne event with the incompetent minister of culture where they push the button...

Oh boy.

I don’t want to freak the museum out but I have 360 degree footage of large sections of the museum (mostly for a spatial index) and now I’m wondering how high a quality I could get with splatting the sculptures and making it public.

Would I get cease desisted for hosting from across the pond? Or would they be too lazy to come after me?

This case was about trying to obtain the museum’s own scans under FOI, it’s nothing to do with releasing your own scans.

I’m open to ideas but I don’t see how they could screw you if they’re your own scans. They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they can’t get you on copyright. It’s not their files, so they can’t get you on piracy.

Do it.

>They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries

While the museum may have some looted items anyway, I thought this is about Rodin's art, i.e. items from Rodin's own collection and studio, or perhaps casts made by the museum. Discussion about looted items seems off topic.

What is a spatial index

I’m sure there will be a better term but that’s my term for a multi-modal searchable vector-store where you can use words to search spaces ala “that sculpture where the man is thinking on a door?” Which returns a physical point in an indoor or outdoor map.

By the time you get C&D’d it would be far too late.

I’d spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.

Rodin died one century ago, there is no copyright

Low resolution scans like yours are already available, generally. This case is about the high res ones.

They might make flying into france really, really really annoying for you or cause you to get all sorts of nasty issues for you when landing in the EU.

I am very much in favor of private, and crowdsourced, and DIY scanning efforts. However, there is a real value to careful, high quality, accurate scanning of important works, and as the Rodin Museum itself might agree, the provenance of that scan data is important. When the originals are closely held and access is restricted, it's up to the institution to produce that high quality data and publish it.

Act first, think later :)

People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.

At least the metamath verifiers will not bend over backwards and come up with absurd inconsistent counterarguments.

It's the most humiliating thing for citizens when the legal cadre of a nation pretends in the national journal that everybody falls for its lies... openly mocking the concept of truth itself with absurdism.

Legal systems typically use non-monotonic logic. Most formal logic systems, particularly in mathematical fields, use monotonic logic. Monotonic logic isn't well suited for the law or most other areas of human activity.

If you want an entire legal system formally defined in logic, you're going to have to do a ton of novel work in expanding the understanding of and application of non-monotonic logic because there isn't much scholarship compared to monotonic logic systems.

That said, France is one of the only countries that has tried anything like this. Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this. I think it uses monotonic logic, though, and I don't think anybody has seriously suggested the French tax code is something to be copied, neither as a tax code or an approach to legal codification more generally.

> Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this.

That's a very interesting fact. Especially in the context of the recent news of the 50 billion euros deficit https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/france-budget-debt-deficit-g...

If their taxes are defined mathematically I would not expect constant mishaps with the budget.

Budgets are based on predictions of the future, and "predictions are difficult, especially about the future".

> But the Rodin Museum and the Ministry of Culture simply ignored the court’s order. To be clear, they did not appeal it, they ignored it.

No formulation of the law will solve this. The problem is clearly not that the law was unclear. Either the people with real power do what's right, or they don't.

> No formulation of the law will solve this.

It's a tall claim, given a proper formalization (say under democratic control), malicious counterparty just can't force the national formal verifier to pronounce this or that if it doesn't follow.

Let me tell you about Mr Trump

please don't make this a partisan issue, I'm sure you can come up with ways to fool a minimalistic verifier (redundantly implemented) into agreeing with your position.

Imagine every autocrat or dictator and all agents of the state, having freedoms, would have to prove the law authorizes them to exercise this or that step, instead of dictating orders. Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law, raised to double check it by formal verification. It will point out any flaws on the path to the "desired conclusion". If properly grounded it would be hell for control freaks, they'd leave government positions at scale, the real problem solvers (some human, some machines if we cherish human rights etc more than vanity) would float up.

Does that sound it makes life easier or harder on your average boogeyman?

And what happens when they say 1+1 doesn't equal 2 and ignore any objections?

I didn't downvote, I'm just curious who "they" is?

suppose for the sake of argument

1) the Rodin museum wishes to continue receiving funds for culture,

2) the citizen interested in the 3D point cloud has a valid argument (which somehow relies on the fact that 1+1=2)

3) the Rodin museum claims 1+1!=2 and ignores the proof that 1+1=2

4) the democracy had already converted the law into first order logic & set theory form by adding normative or ethical axioms and definitions (it probably even doesn't just define all the axioms and definitions, but even includes example theorems and proofs like "a gypsie also enjoys human rights" or "yes a black human also has human rights" (these would be theorems not extra redundant axioms inserted into the law when this or that extravagant scandal broke out).

With everything set up as above: the citizen asks the Rodin museum for the 3D scans, for some bizarre reason the Rodin museum operators experience an existential nervous breakdown and refuses. The citizen starts assembling a proof that citizens have the right to any data the system generates (besides certain exceptional things like privacy violations or national security). The citizen proceeds to go through the list of exceptions and proves each of them inapplicable (unlike the shape of submarine propellers, the shape of Rodin's statues are not on the national registry of national secrecy). Rodin died in 1917. If any personal privacy data is embedded in the shape of Rodin's statue these people who's privacy is affected are long dead. Any shape modifications that occurred at later dates could theoretically leak private details to the public. Perhaps a vandal inscribed the telephone number of some actress. In that case the Rodin museum is provably a bad custodian, so let's assume the museum was a good Custodian, no privacy violations would occur if they release the 3D shape, and the citizen continues through all the cases and demonstrates no exceptions hold. For some reason the citizen relies on the definition of 2=1+1. If you ask what would probably happen if the Museum just ignores it? It just pretends to be a good museum and decides to sweep the floor again, without obeying to the consequences of the citizen's proof.

Last day of the month, it's Rodin museum's turn to deliver proof of fulfilling their duties, if anyone wants to see pay. They fail to demonstrate completion of all their tasks: that citizen by exercising his provable rights, has automatically inserted a task they refuse to complete. They choose to not earn money... automatically some job positions open, the formally verified government is now looking for a new operator of the Rodin museum.

Thats what I would expect happen if formal verification were embraced in society.

So two issues. Fist, the lack of mathematical rigour in law and policy is generally considered a feature, not a bug. Second, if the state is unwilling to compel action or enforce punishment from/on the entity in the wrong (Rodin in this case) then it does not matter at all how compelling or rigorous the argument is.

Which in Rodin's case is what happened, the author did get a judgement ordering Rodin to turn over the data, they refused, the author then went back to the courts to force them to act. The court decided it didn't want to despite the prior judgement.

> Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law,

Ok I can at least see you've thought about this, but this part is not happening. Definitely not this century, probably not ever. Despite our best delusions, we're still just apes who follow other apes, mostly based on social relationships or the appearance of confidence. We can't even train our society to vote.

So thats my point:

we don't need to attain this hypothetical perfectly effective education that prevents us from blindly following authority figures: even if we fail at such an education we can simply guard against the corruption of logic by formal verification, we can design the system to be ape-proof.

You can't make it ape-proof because, at minimum, the last mile of enforcement is performed by apes, who are going to continue following their ape instincts. Unless you plan to have government and law enforcement run entirely by robots.

Technically you are correct that human agents of the state who's pay and freedom depend on compliance with a formal verification governed law doesn't prevent say one of these armed human agents of the state from abusing their arms. But it could guarantee that such human agents can't repeat there crimes systematically: they lose their arms, face fines or are incarcerated. Contrast that with: currently not even formally verified due process is guaranteed. The system is currently allowed to delude itself ad nauseam.

Your argument now seems to be that systematic disobedience or rebellion is infeasible. History offers many counter examples. No one is confused about whether cops planting drugs on people is legal, but it still happens. The only way to prevent this is to build a totalitarian regime of literally unprecedented power. This is bad, whether it succeeds or more likely fails.

Again: the problem in OP wasn't one of interpreting the law. Everyone understood what the law was. They just didn't care, due to ape reasons. And if you can solve those, a formal logical law is mostly an incremental improvement.

What I meant is this: suppose we follow the ape working for the state [which runs on formal verification] that refuses to apply logic, so this ape logs into the decentralized network to see its open task list, somebody asks for a point cloud, the ape doesn't want to send it for ape reasons, the citizen supplies proof that he is entitled to a copy of the file, the ape still refuses, pay is a function of tasks completed, the task never completes and because of it is raised in priority, at some point no new tasks are assigned unless he completes the task, if the ape refuses they lose their position and source of income because ape is not fullfilling duty.

We can make it ape proof, and there is a natural path via arbitrage.

I don't think you actually want to live in that world. Certainly to me it sounds dystopic, far along the road to that unprecedented totalitarian regime I was talking about. Maybe if people are getting "upset" with you, it's because they sense that kind of proposal coming and agree with me that it's extremely dangerous.

My point is, the "national formal verifier" doesn't enter the picture. The entity in the role of a formal verifier in this story gave the correct answer and it didn't help.

Ah, ok, in that case the only additional insight is that if finance is regulated by law, that any agent of the state if its a judge or a police officer, they can only proceed their work (and accept payment) if they prove their steps are valid, both parties can directly point at proofs or lemmas it has constructed and those will be automatically accepted when valid.

Also this would mean you can verify your claims at home and have the same software running locally verify if the verifier-as-a-judge will accept or reject your proof before you even submit it.

Are laws expected to be completely self and cross consistent?

I wanted programmatic law in the past and then after thinking and talking a bit, concluded that self and cross consistency in the law is not considered necessary.

Obviously a formal verifier metamath, and a corresponding database like set.mm but law.mm containing all the normative statements etc would have to be supported by an ecosystem, such an ecosystem should reward finding inconsistencies, since if we tolerate just one inconsistency (which would correspond to true == false) then every statement provably true can be proven false and vice versa, this is the principle of explosion: a formal system loses every meaning when an inconsistency is present, hence an ecosystem maintaining the law would encourage finding inconsistencies instead of swiping the arbitrarianism under the rug.

It can't be completely self and cross consistent, it's not possible. But that is exactly the goal, we just can't achieve it.

How do you know if you are breaking the law or not if it's inconsistent? And like the sibling points out, any inconsistency can be abused to declare you guilty or innocent on any behavior depending on the partisanship and interests of the judge.

I used to want programmatic law for exactly the reason that I could determine what was illegal so I didn't break the law.

After a while and talking to smart people I became convinced that was impossible; instead, we have a judicial system filled with experts who make heuristic decisions, and (ideally) it's biased towards not finding people guilty of breaking complex laws they couldn't have figured out. Life requires flexible thinking.

Formalisation can't save you from determining what is and isn't a document. The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.

>Formalisation can't save you from determining what is and isn't a document.

I'm not sure what this sentence even means, of course the democracy should have define those.

its up to the electorate to democratically define what is a document, to define classifications of types of documents, and which ones are administrative.

> The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.

Except the judge is plainly ignoring valid derivations, and as a verifier making silly "proofs" up (civil law, not common law) in full-frontal-nudity on behalf of one party.

The problem is not the concept of law, nor the concept of democracy, nor the concept of formalization: the problem is how do we defend against and formalize a response to corrupt verifiers in the legal system?

Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.

> Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.

Those who understand law know that formal verifiers cannot replace a judge, because every facet of law (the writing of it, the interpretation of it, the application of it, and the enforcement of it) has to account for all the vagueries of human existence.

No formal verifier can account for definitions that need to expand as the scope of human endeavor expands. No formal verifier can determine mens rea. No formal verifier can determine if something is obscene. No formal verifier can determine someone's mental competence. No formal verifier can cover all mitigating factors. No formal verifier can apply mercy where mercy is needed.

> Those who understand law know that formal verifiers cannot replace a judge, because every facet of law (the writing of it, the interpretation of it, the application of it, and the enforcement of it) has to account for all the vagueries of human existence.

Not the vagueries of human existence, only vagueries of law specified in natural language.

> No formal verifier can account for definitions that need to expand as the scope of human endeavor expands.

No formal verifier is expected to account for definitions, the democracy shapes the law, and the law would first need to be rewritten as definitional axioms in the database of axioms, theorems & proofs. The verifier is just a minimalistic algorithm performing substitution maps on sequences of tokens. This is intentionally minimalistic to minimize the error / attack surface on the verifier itself.

(Currently only error hardening has happened for metamath verifiers, so obviously we would want formal proofs of the absence of 0-days in the verifier)

> No formal verifier can determine mens rea.

It's up to the democratic population while formalizing, to either formally define intent (which presumably goes nowhere), or to pragmatically accept that in the absence of external traces of intent the only thing society can do is define action-reaction patterns, not intention-reaction patterns, but again, that's not the formal verifier, but the database of axioms, definitions (and theorems and proof)

> No formal verifier can determine if something is obscene.

The same, if democracy by referring to a concept of "obscene" chooses to place itself in the position of needing to first define "obscene" in the database of axioms and definitions. But no formal verifier needs to determine this, the verifier just checks a proof in a due process fashion.

> No formal verifier can determine someone's mental competence.

The formal (not natural langue) law could specify how to assess mental competence in a secure non-malleable way (if the democracy decides it needs that). I'm not a dictator, it's not up to me to propose the exact definitions. The formal verifier is not the place to handle these issues, those should reside in the database of axioms and definitions.

> No formal verifier can cover all mitigating factors.

> No formal verifier can apply mercy where mercy is needed.

"but the machine will never man-splain like a human could"

"the machine can only mech-splain a bit at best"

Some of the very weakest arguments against formal verification in law. Like being anti due process.

While this discussion is fascinating I think we should scale it back a little. Instead of discussing all aspects I'm quite curious about just one.

How would you define "document" in a way that allows for formal verification? Ideally without relying on words that leave room for interpretation.

I'm not upset, but what you're proposing is just stupid. If you think that mathematical formalization is a desirable quality then you clearly don't understand the purpose of having a legal system in the first place.

> People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.

I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means. What would that look like in practice?

Lets see some simple example. 18 U.S. Code § 912: “Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

How would you write that in mathematical formalization?

And then how would you make a metamath verifier judge if Robert J. Rippee committed it on January 1, 1991? I’m sure you can google the case(United States v. Rippee, 961 F.2d 677), but a short summary: “On January 1, 1991, officers from the National City, Illinois, Police Department stopped Rippee for making an illegal U-turn. The officers let Rippee go without a ticket, however, when he told them he was a United States Marshal on his way to break up a fight at Fannies' Night Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. […] Rippee stipulated that he was not and had never been a United States Marshal.“

How would something like that look like under your proposed system?

> I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means.

metamath is an open source formal verification system, the current metamath project (not focussed on law, but mathematics) has roughly 3 parts:

1) the formal verifier (there are multiple re implementations)

2) the databases of axioms (including definitions), theorems and proofs: currently most math is in set.mm the database for set theory (which includes numbers, etc)

3) documentation, among which a thorough book describing how the formal verifier works, the book is creative commons

A proof is basically a series of invocations (by label) of axioms, or previously concluded facts or rules, in the right order so that the verifier comes to the desired conclusion. The algorithm performs all the substitutions and after the last invocation either the string it arrived at matches the proclaimed theorem or it doesn't. Of course it can also error out earlier, say if an invocation to an unknown label happened.

Precisely because natural language is ambiguous, the conversion of our natural laws into formal ones would have to happen under democratic control.

If academic mathematicians want to preserve a human mathematical academy in the face of governments potentially making the future mistake of abolishing mathematical academia, their strong move would be for them to define a "government for and by mathematicians", the database would contain definitions of their choosing, formally regulating how to award public funds into research, formalizing front-running resistant timestamping of work-in-progress etc, so that mathematicians can freely talk and communicate advances ("just wait a sec, let me sync my insights with the network first, ... aaand done, ok now I can speak freely").

Ultimately from a survival perspective, which type of system do we believe to be more robust against corruption and conflicts of interest? one where due process is formally defined in a rigorous manner? or one where those who corrupt the system happen to corrupt it towards actual progress?

Can you walk through the process for the proposed example?

The problem in most suites is checking if a specific act in real life meets some definition of a crime and not figuring out the wording of the law, right?

You kill someone without a reasonable excuse -> You get punished x years for murder

wouldn't really make murder trials easier because you would still have to formalize what you put into the proof.

Nobody gets upset, they just think you’re silly. Law simplification is just a classic time waste discussion. But I’ll waste 30 seconds on it for you.

Consider a simple crime, murder. Let’s simplify it to “if you kill someone, that’s murder and you get life”

But then what if I’m being stabbed by the person I kill?

Okay so self defence.

But then what if I say it’s self defence but factually that’s incorrect, but I genuinely believed it was self defence?

What if I’m a soldier and I’m shooting an enemy?

What if I shoot them because they’re raping my child?

What if I’m shooting them because they raped my child ten years ago and I’ve been plotting my revenge ever since?

What if someone said they’ll shoot me if I didn’t shoot them?

What if I was in psychosis and thought they were going to kill me?

What if I thought they were a deer and shot them by mistake while hunting?

It turns out we have all these laws in this particular way because of thousands of years of work dealing with all of these issues.

Other than genuine self defense, I disagree with every single “justification” you listed. So yes, in my eyes (and the eyes of many other people I expect), the law could be substantially simplified.

You can disagree but no one has to care...unless you can mobilize an army.

Anyway it seems like much of this discussion presupposes the virtue of law and or has amnesia regarding its origins and its service to power. Sure there are exceptions, not every civilization has turned into a tinpot dictatorship because they adopted having a legal system. But without exception, it's those in power who make the rules. And quite often the powerful make rules that benefit them...often benefitting them exclusively.

I would rather live in a society with just laws than not, but again who settles what is just and what is not? Some people clearly have very different ideas. And yet geopolitics and world history aren't determined by the discourse.

And anyway, the law and justice are two different things. Many judges and attorneys will tell you so, I've known more than a few.

Did the post actually justify anything? Reads like a list of things that make simplification of laws hard.

And if you can’t sympathise with any of those cases, I hope you’re never called upon to decide anything involving other people.

How do you mathematically verify something like mens rea?

I don't get upset. I just know that you have no idea what you're talking about. Talk to some tech native, smart, practicing lawyers for an hour about this.

Show me the lawyer versed in metamath holding your opinion, and I would love to talk for an hour, and probably more!

If you are able to arrange such a discussion, I am genuinely interested!

"I'm right until you get me a conversation with Terence Tao".

Sorry, a random stranger on the internet is not going to spoonfeed you. You need to do the work to enlighten yourself.

You don't need a lawyer "well versed in metamath". You're being elitist and dismissing perfectly competent experts who know more than enough to demolish your ideas.

There exist voluntary paths towards formal verifiers as judges: arbitrage.

Parties can agree to some contract and settle any potential future issues in a predetermined specific court of their choice.

Tech companies might prefer the legal certainty formal verification systems provide vis-a-vis human-run courts.

As their use expands, the necessary definitions and normative axioms evolve, until normal companies and then normal people start using it.

The act of formalization from natural language law to metamath database, could probably be done by swarms of agents, resulting in multiple competing formalizations from which competing human subfactions select and promote.

On the face of it this is establishment forces looking after each other to hold back data they fear could have value when it should be in the (French) public domain

But, we are hearing from one side, one perspective. The museum has not had a fair expression of their side here.

Court proceedings can look unfairly bizarre when unfairly reported. I am not saying this report is definitely unfair, but it is impossible to tell

The museum sets out its position in the letter from the director, linked in the article. The court record also mentioned isn’t public. So it seems that if the museum has a different argument to make than in the letter, they’re not taking the opportunity to do publicly. Draw from that what you will!

This is an absolute par-for-the-course FOIA case anywhere in the world.

There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?

In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.

Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.

Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaps

[1] "Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas" https://mchap.io/

The way you get governments to actually do anything is via politics and hitting the isolated public servants in their careers. Dollar for dollar and hour for hour it is by far the most effective way than vs. the courts unless there is a proven exception in them being effective this way.

A very good warning to most museums that rely on reproductions and so on to not make high-quality scans of their artifacts. Once you do so, you lose a revenue stream in reproductions because anyone then will have high-quality data to produce reconstructions. If anyone has already done this, they are probably best served to immediately destroy those on some kind of archival cost pretext, retaining only the original artifacts.

The steady state of this might be that most artifacts are at risk of being lost, certainly, but this particular combination of rules certainly makes it hard for a public museum to survive. Private collections face no such risk, of course.

Even without the original high quality scans, surely some talented artists could make a passable facsimile which is suitable to sell in a knick-knack gift shop.

Do they actually have any sculptures that don't already have copies spread around the world in other museums? They are fighting a losing battle here.

There are a few lesser works that the museum has not yet exhausted the legal maximum production of 12 posthumous, so-called "originals".

Steal, lie, cheat, do what you want as long as you do not take from other _people_. A government is not a person, a business is not a person, a museum is not a person. They should not have the power to deprive you from accessing any media which they "own" but did not create.

will this be appealed at the EU level?

It may be possible, but unlikely.

In one of our briefs in the Conseil d'Etat we asserted (and, I think, well supported) that the museum's refusal to communicate its scans to me constituted an infringement of my freedom of expression as defined in Article 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In some circumstances, this opens up the possibility of appealing the CE's decision in the European Court of Human Rights.

We have not done a deep analysis of that possibility in light of the specific way the CE handled the case. It's an open question. However, given our limited time and resources, it is unlikely we would have the means to pursue it further.

We omitted this Article 10 argument until the very end, since from the outset I wanted to take an "everyman" position without any special circumstances or pleas about end-uses. When we did finally present the Article 10 free expression argument, we detailed my own work and intentions for disseminating the scans to the public.

I can tell you that the Article 10 argument seemed to really alarm the Rodin Museum. They responded to it at length. I would say they did a poor job of responding to it, but they certainly seemed concerned by it.

You can read our Article 10 argument here, in English or French, in sections IV and V: https://cosmowenman.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/040_20250...

> Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh

Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.

They're described as "Paris-based", not necessarily French.

From the 1500s, there were large numbers of Irish mercenaries called 'Wild Geese' who served in continental armies, and there have been communities of ethnic Irish people there for centuries. In particular a large number of Jacobite refugee families settled in Normandy after 1691. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Wild_Geese

Interesting! Thanks.

I'll fucking scan them then. Are they just out on the floor? They can't stop me.

It sounds like that's besides the point. High res scans already exist. They just wanted to make a point it seems.

Your low res rushed phone scans are already available.

The Rodin Museum's bronzes are not even "the originals", which makes this whole thing amusing.

The originals created by Rodin were clay models, from which plaster molds were made. Those were used to cast bronzes. Not just one bronze copy, many copies. There are at least 23 copies of "The Thinker" cast during Rodin's lifetime, and even more later copies.[1]

In the SF Bay Area, the Palace of the Legion of Honor has one. One of the point clouds shown is of Rodin's "Gates of Hell", and a copy of that can be seen outside the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, which has a small garden of Rodin bronzes. So if you really need a 3D scan, there are lots of bronzes available to scan.

What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.[2] Resin copies are available through the gift shop, and bronze copies can be ordered. They have a complicated argument about "moral rights" to justify their monopoly which is marginal at this late date. (Rodin died in 1917.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Thinker_sculptures

[2] https://boutique.musee-rodin.fr/en/10-sculpture-reproduction...

> What scares the Rodin Museum is that they are still selling reproductions.

No, what scares them is the idea that someone else might view their artwork without visiting their museum. Revenue from the gift shop doesn't enter into it at all.

What's the issue with 3D printing?? The open-source community reproduction of Roden's The Thinker is at least as hi-rez as the professional scans.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5169144

Oh you

The French law considers the first 12 bronze productions of a clay cast as an original.

Article R. 122-3 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle

Right but no court follows French law so who cares?

Yes, but we've clearly seen the value and effectiveness of French law here...

First 12 are an "original". Right.

Rodan was a great artist, but his works were cranked out in a factory, with parts of the process outsourced. The concept of "original" here is weak.

There was once a comic, "The Artist", which had a little guy with a beret and smock. In one panel, he was shown standing on a railed balcony overlooking an enormous high-volume printing press. The caption was "Each print was produced under the direct control and supervision of the artist".

I've seen such an operation in person. Back when software came in boxes, I ordered some custom boxes made. I went to the printing plant with the box artwork on a CD, and talked with the prepress person. She made it fit the box template, using a Macintosh connected to a plate-making machine the size of a car. She said "You want to see the press?", and so I put in earplugs and went into the pressroom. They had a press about a hundred feet long, sheet fed, and capable of about 12 colors of ink. Extra colors were used for shiny gold seals, brushwork, and other special effects. It wasn't turning out boxes that day. It was printing "art reproductions". When the box business was slow, they printed high-quality artworks. Some were reproductions of public domain or licensed material, and some were contract jobs for artists. Pricing was about $4000 for the first copy, $0.25 for each additional copy. It's almost all setup cost. They had some original art and printed copies hung side by side to show off how good the copies were.

The lower-volume version of this is Giclée prints.[1] Those are "collectables" made on an inkjet printer. The term was coined in 1990.

Henry Ford was once marketed to by an art dealer. They sent him a big glossy coffee table book, a catalog of pictures they were selling. When they came by for the sales pitch, Ford's response was to ask why he would want the original when he had a perfectly good copy in the book. He was pulling their chain, of course, but what else would you expect from the guy who made mass production of automobiles work.

The art industry tries very hard to push the concept of valuable "originals". But really, some of this stuff should be taken about as seriously as "original" NFTs. There's currently an "art glut", despite frantic efforts to prop up collectable art prices.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gicl%C3%A9e

[2] https://robbreport.com/shelter/art-collectibles/art-glut-tan...

I'm more curious how 12 was arrived at. Why not 10 (the French invented metric, after all) or 16 if they were going for some arbitrary round number?

Speaking of Rodin bronzes, if you ever get a chance, check out the Auguste Rodin Gallery at the Maryhill Museum of Art [0]. The museum is located in a beautiful setting on the sides of the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state basically in the middle of nowhere. If the weather is nice, the views of Mount Hood in Oregon are fabulous. The bronze casting process is explained and demonstrated in the gallery. As I recall, there are more than ten steps involving negative and positive impressions before you get to the final work of art. How this fabulous art collection ended up in such a remote location is also an interesting story.

[0] https://www.maryhillmuseum.org/

> "...if you ever get a chance, check out the Auguste Rodin Gallery at the Maryhill Museum of Art"

I wholeheartedly concur. Just a few hours up the Gorge from Portland/Vancouver, Maryhill is a great place to take visitors up for it.

If memory serves, the Rodin exhibit has original plaster casts signed by Rodin and dozens of other works. In addition, the vast museum contains the huge and fascinating collections of its founders.

Nearby is the Stonehenge replica constructed to match the original as closely as possible. Definitely worth visiting.

Several of the sculptures the museum scanned were plaster casts, including La Porte de l'Enfer and Les Trois Ombres. Given the destruction and reproduction inherent in the way Rodin's studio and foundry partners were producing bronzes at the time, the plasters are the most accurate, highest quality versions of the works, and are the closest to the hand of the artist. The molds used for the production of bronzes would have been made (and remade after they wore out) from the plasters. Accurate scans of the plasters are, arguably, therefore of much higher archival and commercial value than any scan of a subsequent bronze cast would be.

Not only that, many of Rodin's works were scaled up or scaled down from the original, using a pantograph.[1] When you see a monumental scale Rodin bronze, you're looking at something that was traced from a smaller version.

[1] https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co47993...

I guess I never want to do business in France. What an abominable court system.

Freedom of information law's in almost all countries are about being able to access administrative documents so there can be accountability and transparency. The court ruled that a 3D scan is in this case not an administrative document.

And let's be real here; A ruling that a 3d scan of a piece of art is a "administrative document" would have been far weirder.

Is a policeman's body camera footage an administrative document? At least in the US the law is called the freedom of information act, not the freedom of administrative documents act. Unless actual harm to an innocent member of the public comes from releasing information held by the government or publicly funded institutions, isn't the correct presumption that it's the property of the people?

Re: what "FOI is for" please see my comment above, excerpting FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN FRANCE, LAW AND PRACTICE.

Re: "Weird" documents: The CADA and courts have routinely recognized that documents in formats such as audio recordings, x-rays, photographs (of submerged shipwrecks, no less), video, application source code, and computer algorithms may be considered administrative documents, communicable to the public. FWIW, a 3D scan being an administrative document doesn't seem weird at all to me, nor did it seem weird to the many government attorneys at the CADA analyzing the issue, nor to the cultural heritage and open source and digital rights experts and advocates who joined my case, nor to the Paris court.

The Conseil d'Etat did not even say that scans could not be administrative documents, or that that would be weird; they just ruled that these documents in particular were akin to physical works and therefore part of the museum's inalienable collection, and so were outside FOI law.

> I guess I never want to do business in France.

Good call.

> What an abominable court system.

I you wanted to do business there, the court system would be the least of your worries.

Perhaps look at the case from another perspective.

Ask if, since they used public money to create these, what public benefit was produced by it.

If you can have them admit, or can prove, no public benefit, it's misspent public funds.

If it's misspent public funds then its public reimbursement at the least for all the works they have scanned as a minimal response.

You could argue the case the directors are liable for incompetence, or possibly criminality for knowingly misappropriating the public funds or contempt of court for earlier cases.

When faced with this as a more serious charge, the museum may then choose to simply release the documents to settle the case. You may not even have to prove anything.

IANAL but have been involved in (other country) public council appeals.

The scans guide conservation work, concerving the statues is a public benefit.

Whilst I think on balance the scans should be public; it is more important that the FOI laws strike a perfect balance of enabling efficient administration whilst shinning enough light to reduce corruption.

I would not want museums to be reluctant to create scans and archives that compromise their short term funding models if they are useful for conservation.

The purpose of conservation in this case is for the public good, else it would be a private collection and hoarded.

To say they are useful for conservation is to say it's for the public, there is afaics no separation of concerns here unless you're arguing the museum should act a private collector in its conservation?

To counterpoint your next argument that the conservation using this material must be handled by specialists, yes it should, if they were casts of bones etc and are themselves genuinely rare and difficult to replicate.

Digital goods are only rare by virtue of the body holding them not making copies... By acting in a private capacity.

> it is more important that the FOI laws strike a perfect balance

More important than what? What is a perfect balance?

This is not a good way of stating an opinion about what one should value.

In my opinion it is more important that FOI laws are balanced even if that dosn't ensure the outcome I would prefer of giving the public access to the scans.

It is so strange to see people volunteer imaginary explanations for the Rodin Museum's behavior and motives. It is understandable, though, since the museum refuses to make any public comment on the case or its policies. In court, however, the Rodin Museum itself says it does not use its scans for conservation: in its many court filings it was adamant that it did not use its scans for any purpose whatsoever and that the scan documents were of such low quality as to be useless. They told the court they had to search for them in response to my request. Their scans do not guide any conservation work: they sit idle on DVDs in a locked filing cabinet.

It sounds like they have mislead the court and that certainly should be punished.

However storing them idle in a locked filing cabinet for a conservationist to reference in 100 years may well still be valuable.

They don't use public money to produce them (and maintain the museum).

It is self-funded. Public, but self-funded.

So this has nothing to do with misspent public money.

The Rodin Museum is a piece of jewel in Paris that exists only because Rodin himself decided for things to be run that way on his deathbed.

The wish of the artist overrules the wishes of random people that "consume" his work.

I presume that when you read the article, you missed the part about the "written applications for public funding to produce [the] scans" -- which the author alleges the Rodin Museum falsely denied having submitted?

Whenever I explain this case I really do my best to make it perfectly clear that the Rodin Museum solicited and received public funds from the Ministry of Culture for the express purpose of 3D scanning its collection. This public financing is not (any longer) a state secret. And yet one thing in this world is certain: if you ask the Rodin Museum to comment on its operations or any public policy issue, they will make sure to mention that they are "self-funded"...

And, IMO, Auguste Rodin's wishes (real or imaginary) are utterly irrelevant. I don't mean to dismiss the sentiment motivating people's desire to respect an artist's perceived wishes, but in practical terms they are usually, and in this case definitely and in every respect, completely irrelevant.

Fascinating work and write-up. This is like a vignette of France: weaponized mauvaise-foi, sacred institutions and, more generally, some remnants of an aristocratic hierarchy, and also probably a lot of honest technical incompetence.

FOI is for administrative documents to increase transparency in government. Detailed 3D scans a museum does for research or preservation isn't an administrative document.

If you want a 3d scan of these statues, there's a lot of them around in scannable places like parks etc. If you just want to win, you're wasting everyone's time for no good reason.

Absolutely. An “activist” wasting time and money of museums (and probably taxpayers) worldwide due to a misleading interpretation of FOI.

Have you ever read this? https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj/eng

I hope La Quadrature and company appeal this refusal to the EU.

Also even without the context above, a museum preventing people from experiencing and studying items from its collection (since the point clouds were apparently ruled such) is enough of a grounds for activist action against them.

What is the source of your knowledge of French FOI law? Are you already familiar with this topic?

The museum's own internal request for clarification said they are administrative documents.

  ...According to the advice of February 7, 2019 issued by the Commission d'accès aux documents administratifs (CADA)1, engaged by you, the files in question would constitute communicable administrative documents, insofar as they are developed and held by the Rodin Museum as part of its public service mission. In addition, CADA rejected various arguments in favor of of their non-communicability2. It also indicates that these documents are reusable, including commercially, but that the museum can establish a pricing for the reuse of its three-dimensional scans.

Quoted from the 20190627 English version of the letter.

Re: "FOI is for":

From FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN FRANCE, LAW AND PRACTICE, Dr. Yseult Marique (Essex/Speyer), Dr. Emmanuel Slautsky (Université libre de Bruxelles) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3033917

Page 19: "Before 2005 the reuse for commercial purposes of documents disclosed under the FOIA was restricted. Since 2005 and the implementation of Directive 2003/98/EC a right to reuse public information contained in administrative documents for purposes other than those for which the documents were initially prepared or received by the authority has been established under the conditions currently set out in book III of the CRPA. This right to reuse is made more effective by the fact that, whenever public information is electronically disclosed, it must be disclosed in an open standard that can easily be reused and automatically processed. This is important as inadequate standards significantly limit the possibilities for reusing administrative documents … The reuse of public information is normally free of charge. This principle is one of the main measures adopted in recent years in France to encourage the reuse of public information as part of the French policy of open data within the public sector. Public bodies are therefore compelled to allow economic operators to reuse valuable data generated in the public sector freely."

Page 39: "The FOIA has failed to trigger a revolution in how citizens request access to administrative documents. There is a fair number of requests. Sometimes these requests touch highly sensistive political matters (e.g. access to financial information related to President Sarkozy’s electoral campaing, Areva’s security failure etc.). However, all in all, the FOIA seems to be only used in marginal cases. The FDRA sought to bring a deep shake-up here. It sought to develop a stronger market logic with a clear demand-side and a clear offer-side to administrative data and documents. The pioneering idea that France seeks to put forward is that administrative information is economically valuable and that putting this information on the web will spur actors to use it, analyse it, dig into databases and eventually make valuable use of this newly acquired knowledge (i.e. because of economic uses or thanks to calling public bodies into account)."

In case anyone wanted further evidence that legal systems everywhere are not for the people...

Article is not useful because it does not bother to motivate why the scans were requested or why anyone other than a legalistic, formalistic person would consider them administrative documents. The author assumes all this is obvious and it isn't.

The author reasonably assumes that his audience may have been following this over the last few years (it has been featured on HN at multiple stages).

For example, https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/16/auguste-rodins-sculpture...

Based on the other posts it sounds like the point is to feed it into the maw of AI generated art engines

The project was begun in 2017 and the suit was filed in 2019.

The first several paragraphs of my previoius story, about the lead up to the appeal, explain my motivation for establishing and promoting public acess to 3D scans of public domain cultural heritage works: https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/secret-3d-scans-in-the-fr...

As does my presentation, "The Archetypes Burst In": https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/the-archetypes-burst-in

https://www.lincoln3dscans.co.uk/ Oliver Laric, an artist worked with the museum to scan and make available their collection.

Very interesting discussion. Others here note a general question whether FOI laws are really intended to address such documents. But I have also another angle:

Generally a public preservation grant will have conditions, especially if EU funded (not mentioned but well likely as EU finances huge digitalisation efforts).

I'm surprised the author does not mention these grant documents which financed the digitalisation. I would expect these to have provisions on sharing/making available/publication. If they do you have a separate case: breach of contract (of either national or EU provisions). This would lead to financial penalties and generally wake the institutions up.

https://www.europeana.eu/en

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/basic-princ...

This case has been going on for years and I read a lot about it awhile ago. The write ups are so extensive I'd be surprised if they didn't, somewhere, write paragraphs about the documents you mentioned.

The funding applications are linked directly in the body of my story.

It’s 2026. Take your phone and make your own point cloud in under 5 minutes.

I did it with some statues in Italy. 3D prints were at my door before I stepped off the plane.

Low res scans are already generally available for lots of these. This case is about high res scans that phones cannot do.

Surely the museum could have avoided a costly court case altogether by recording the point cloud on a urinal together with the signature "R. MUTT", thereby transforming it into a work of art and part of the patrimony of the French nation rather than a public document.

That is problem I have personally experienced in France that the administrative justice is bat shit and often being biased and not respecting citizen laws.

I had cases where the official body lied, and the lies where exposed but still it is like they didn't care. Real example:

- opposite side: the memorandum of the accusation was complete enough as you can see they have 90 pages.

- me: what, no, lies, my memorandum is 15 pages as you can obviously see counting the pages.

- decision: rules against me because my 90 pages memorandum shows that the analysis was complete enough.

Another case:

- me: election should be cancelled because not respecting the at least 30% parity law

- opposing party: argument without ground because 1 woman over 6 mans, 1/5 = 40% so please reject the request.

- me: but no, 1/5 = 20% not 40%.

- decision: rejected because more than 30% proved by opposition.

And the worse of all in some decisions "ok, they didn't respect the law, didn't respect the due process, but if they did would have it changed that much the result? Not sure so let's reject the request as without ground..."

But if you over speed the limit, then you will get a ticket in all cases. So it is like not the same justice for everyone.

And something that can explain a little bit why administrative justice is so aweful in France is that judges in this instances are not professional judges but former gouvernement workers that are assigned there. So in the end it is like asking gouv workers to rule against other gouv workers decisions. Totally biased.

In the USA you can get around such administrative batshittery[0] in lower side courts like this one by targeting the competence / career of the judge itself essentially by putting them in catch 22s where the right thing is to do the thing you want. That is usually having cases where an appeal court will cancel their ruling and in that ruling question the competence of the judge to continue being a judge or legal professional, which the battshittery exposes them to that specific risk. This is something you can do more in common law systems vs. the napoleonic courts that France has AFAIK, and the US constitution also helps here too.

This is usually how you get hostile government organizations & staff to do what you want, you need to hit them in the career and figure out how to do so quickly.

[0] batshittery = where they are doing things like ignoring basic logic / reality and other obviously against the law things

This is also, as you know, why france loves it's strikes & protests because the citizenry feel like they have nothing else.

There is certainly politics and posturing and power grabs behind the scenes, but besides that if we look at the economics it’s clearly worth revisiting.

I can understand a museum being worried about the long-term with the current structure:

- Operating a museum necessarily needs money. It’s not always a huge amount if they have the right relationships, but it’s never $0 and so money needs to come in

- Selling tickets relies on people seeing value in seeing the pieces in person

- Selling gift shop items also relies on people coming in as well as being the only source for good quality versions of those things

- Selling posters and other prints also relies on being the only source for good quality versions

What else brings in cash besides government funding (at risk over decades as politics shift) and maybe sales of some pieces (unsustainable of course since you need those to run a museum)?

I can understand the admin staff being terrified of letting the general public have access to files that have the potential to be turned in to perfect enough recreations, but I think everyone here knows that fear and litigation cannot solve their problems any more.

What is sustainable long-term? I suspect that an important piece is that on the whole, enough people want history to be preserved properly and they want some sort of institution to handle that preservation for the public good.

I really don’t think that the existence of high quality reproductions would make a difference. The people who want to visit the museum want to have the full experience of the museum and be in the presence of the originals.

Most museums are happy to share digital versions because it helps increase awareness and expose more people to the work, which then makes more people want to come to the museum for the experience

Musée Rodin, 2010-2013: "The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."

I do wonder what the end goal of people like Amélie Simier is. How is this a hill worth dying on, or at the very least leaving behind a family legacy of being a moron?

The rule of law is a hill worth dying on.

The museum and judges are outlaws.

Why do they need to be sustainable as a business..? The best museums are a service that the public funds (or not). Side note: the museums in America generally suck and are just capitalist activity centers for kids, in my experience. You can't manufacture a good museum's exhibits. I don't think many Americans even know what a museum is, based on their reviews of some I've been to.

Museums are worthwhile to fund instead of throwing them to the wolves of the private sector.

Why would the financing of the museum be the primary metric? The common good of Rodin reproductions is easily comparable with a moderate pinch in the museum's cash flow. Or it's closer to being incomparable, but from the other direction.

I’m extrapolating. I don’t have direct insight in to the higher levels of museum org charts, but what I do have is lots of first-hand experience with the higher levels of corporate org charts. Specifically calling out the “what can we control to keep this business afloat” type of person. When I read the piece I saw a lot of the signs I would expect to see from that type of person

Forgive me for my ignorance: Why should the Rodin Museum be obligated to provide 3D scans of Rodin’s sculptures? OP jumps into legal arguments about FOI without connecting the dots from the law to the point clouds.

Let us zoom out: The minister of culture, Rachida Dati, is under investigation for taking bribes. She came to power under Sarkozy, a president who was later convicted for taking donations from Gaddafi for his election.

There is a very large difference between how the rule of law is perceived and understood in french culture and anglo cultures.

Especially when it comes to the government/administration and folks working in it: the very notion that they, as well as folks working in the judicial system are subject to it as if they were normal members of the flock, is indeed, as another poster pointed out, complete anathema.

Sometimes a bit of wood, rope, and a sturdy blade will help.

On humorous side notie, it looks like the liked "Ministry of Culture’s own published guidance on the proper formatting" [0] has auto-translated Nikon's .NEF RAW file format extension into .NAVE without any editor noticing.

Also, these RAW formats do support compression, in some cases even lossy modes.

[0] https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09... - page 54/55 screenshotted in the article.