Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

No, it's different in many many ways. And there are not just one, but four courts of last resort in France:

- Cour de Cassation, for civil matters

- Conseil d'État, for matters regarding the administration / the State

- Tribunal des Conflits: tasked with deciding who's right when the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d'État disagree

- Conseil Constitutionnel: issues rulings about the constitutionality of laws, both new (before they become law) and existing ones (QPC)

This doesn't stop here however; there are two upper courts in the European Union, than can invalidate decisions issued by national courts:

- Court of Justice (in Luxembourg)

- Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg)

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Edit: Don't you love the idea of "Tribunal des Conflits"? The original idea was that the State could not be brought to court, its decisions being made by "the people" who is the absolute sovereign.

Then France gradually accepted the idea that State's decision could be challenged, and created a whole different judicial system, the "justice administrative". It took a looong time: from 1800 to... 1980. A much simpler approach could have been to let people try their case against the State before the existing courts, but no... much better to build another system with its own rules, its own judges, etc.

An inevitable consequence of having two different systems is that they sometimes disagree. (Another reason why it would have been so much simpler to just have one system.) Since the two systems are sometimes at odds with one another, we created... a third system! This was in 1872, so quite early in the process.

This Tribunal des Conflits is a referee of sorts whose only job is to stop the fights between the two justice systems. I think that's great and tells a lot about the French way of solving problems: just add a new bureaucratic authority on top of all existing ones.

> In an ironic development, the judges specifically reasoned against musée Rodin’s trade secrecy claim by citing its 3D digitization funding applications to the Ministry of Culture, in which the museum stipulated its commitment to publishing its scans. The museum had attempted to hide these funding applications from us and the court, telling the court they did not exist.

There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.

When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one.

I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed.

I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it.

This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.

They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas, etc. which is probably a very reasonable fear given that the guy filing suit and writing this blog post runs a company that creates replica artwork?

Not a non-profit but Ubisoft has been doing significant 3D scanning and sharing (unsure under what license) for their Assassins Creed franchise: https://mocapsolutions.com/blogs/news/assassin-s-creed-unity...

I haven’t played all the games but the recent ones I tried had a historical tour mode where you get to explore day-in-the-life of an Ancient Greek city or Viking village, with people going about their routines working, trading, farming, gathering. With VR it would be the closest thing to time travel we currently have.

And they do have many of the historical landmarks in pretty stunning detail, with drapes and paintings of what it most probably looked like back then.