Astro Hacker News - Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

pj_mukh |next [-]

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?

DoctorOetker |next |previous [-]

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.

andrewflnr |root |parent |next [-]

> 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.

DoctorOetker |root |parent [-]

> 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.

dekhn |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

DoctorOetker |root |parent [-]

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.

shiandow |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

nradov |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

simonw |next |previous [-]

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?

atombender |root |parent |next [-]

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.

awongh |root |parent |next [-]

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.

shiandow |root |parent |previous [-]

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?

awongh |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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....

Onavo |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

unyttigfjelltol |root |parent [-]

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.

echoangle |root |parent |previous [-]

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…

worik |previous [-]

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