Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

cosmowenman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 315 posts

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#131

Post by some_random »

newaccount74 wrote: post #58
myrmidon wrote: post #48

This is utterly puzzling to me. I just don't understand how you sit on the museums side of the trial on this, without seriously questioning your own position and conceding immediately. They were basically arguing that they are entitled to hide those scan artifacts to better protect their gift shop?! How can they even reconcile those arguments with preserving the artists legacy/serving the common good? I'm also surpri…

> weird, jealous hoarding mentality happening on the museums side That's exactly it. I work on a website that makes ancient artefacts accessible. A lot of them are in museums. You wouldn't believe how many museums: - don't want to show you their archive - don't want to let you take pictures - want you to share only low res pictures - want you to get permission before you can "publish" their artefacts, etc. It's extre…

>It's extremely common for museums to have courtyards or basements with special "unpublished" pieces that they don't let anyone see. You have to be a special friend of the director or something to get to see them.

I think people really don't appreciate just how many artifacts museums have that they don't show to the public, don't document, and largely just sit on and gatekeep. It's especially bad when you consider the movement in museum curation from showing large numbers of artifacts with minimal annotation to smaller numbers of highly annotated more "significant" items.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#132

Post by dagenleg »

Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic?

I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#133

Post by bhickey »

yardstick wrote: post #83
ACS_Solver wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same person fought for years to get the Berlin Egyptian museum to release 3D scans of the famous Nefertiti bust. The museum also claimed it would undermine its revenue streams through the gift shop, but as the case progressed, that turned out to be very misleading - the museum had made less than 5000 EUR over ten years from 3D scans. https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-...

Devils advocate: Maybe they were worried about sales of photos of the bust, and other products of the bust but not created using the scans? Could one take all the scans and produce a coffee table book of photos similar to what the gift shops often sell? Honestly the whole gift shop argument is weird. I have no sympathy for them. You can get plenty of knockoffs now if you wanted: the world is full of Statue of Liberty…

Approximately no one is going to buy a museum gift shop coffee table book anywhere other than at a museum gift shop.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#134

Post by hotspot_one »

dTal wrote: post #94
rendall wrote: post #73

> ...I approached musée Rodin with a strategy to illicit a full airing... Minor typo: if the author or anyone who knows him is reading this, the word wanted there probably is elicit .

That jumped out to me as well, particularly given the otherwise high quality of the writing. It's an example of what I perceive as a more general phenomenon - spelling errors, particularly confusion of uncommon homonyms[note], appear to have increased in frequency. I previously attributed it to the internet simply lowering the bar for "publishing" to the less educated, and the greater proportion of text that makes it…

or speech-to-text systems. The person might not be typing the text.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#135

Post by rootusrootus »

SapporoChris wrote: post #123
rootusrootus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representa…

It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.

I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#136

Post by AyyEye »

mapt wrote: post #116
AyyEye wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photogrammetry is well established and you can do that with any camera and a few hours of cpu time.

Photogrammetry is great with textured, consistently lit, opaque objects. Blank white plaster, less so. You really want some kind of microtexture to grab on to for it to be anywhere close to a structured light scanner. That may mean you want a macro lens and a thousand exposures because you're grabbing on to microscopic surface roughness or dust. Not necessarily easy to do surreptitiously.

Yes they are different things and photogrammetry isn't a replacement for a "real" 3d scanner. But this is about museums which largely aren't unlit plain white surfaces. Getting models of museum objects is generally doable by anyone without thousands in specialised equipment. Taking a video or pictures is a lot less weird than pulling out any scanner.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#137

Post by BlueTemplar »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #34
Symbiote wrote: post #24

> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.) I was initially sympathetic to…

This the law of unintended consequences in action. I suspect that neither the government nor museums thought there was any legal obligations to make 3D scans public and I'd wager that the legislator did not have that in mind when they drafted the freedom of information laws. But then, suddenly (as per linked article): " The Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) ... had never before considered any di…

Good laws try to be future-proof. Transparency of government is a big deal in liberal democracies.

It's incongruous for a museum to resist something like this, when exhibiting artifacts to the public is one of the main reasons for their very existence.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#138

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

warkdarrior wrote: post #114
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would they lie about it then? T Because among copyright/IP maximalists, the whole point is that they own an idea or a picture or a look or a fashion and deserve to keep it to themselves forever. It's not a rational attitude, but it's a real one and unfortunately rather common.

And what is the alternative? How do we get it applied to software copyrights?

Flip the script and make everything public unless it has a sort-of "license" which explicitly restricts access. People can proactively restrict access to their work, which would allow for lawsuits, and others can see the potentially very restrictive licenses which some will put on their stuff and possibly learn to avoid such licenses.

Hard to say how that would look or happen in practice but it's interesting to think about.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#139

Post by squigz »

whimsicalism wrote: post #117
ACS_Solver wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same person fought for years to get the Berlin Egyptian museum to release 3D scans of the famous Nefertiti bust. The museum also claimed it would undermine its revenue streams through the gift shop, but as the case progressed, that turned out to be very misleading - the museum had made less than 5000 EUR over ten years from 3D scans. https://reason.com/2019/11/13/a-german-museum-tried-to-hide-...

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?

The huge piles of revenue?

> 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. In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#140

Post by kardos »

dagenleg wrote: post #132

Why exactly is non-commercial open access problematic? I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?

There is no privatization here (moving the scans from public domain to private), the author is seeking the opposite, shifting the scans to the public unencumbered.
Post reply on HN