Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court • Hacker News Board

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#271

Post by eptcyka » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

holowoodman wrote: post #91

tomrod wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the standard Music Industry response to Napster, alive and well decades later. "Make the information hard to get! We own it!" Never realizing that sampling of the information makes it just that much more prestigious and desirable to us, the unwashed masses, willing to pay to visit a museum that has AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS. If you start with the assumption that every view is a lost sale, you're going to have a rea…

Actually, imho, the AMAZING ORIGINAL THINGS are actually useless. You can not touch them, get close, rotate them, look at them properly, take your time. You are just number 29387 that day visiting the Mona Lisa, you get 5s to view it, then the line moves on. A high-res photo or 3d-scan allows you to do all those things (maybe except really touching them). So aside from the emotional benefit of having been near the re…

I’ve been told that digital (and analogue) photography still cannot reproduce all the colors in good enough detail, and the screens are still not good enough to reproduce the details that can be seen in person.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#272

Post by necovek » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 3:49 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #262

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Double flip the script: Government(s) levy royalties on IP it protects. I'd feel a lot less grumpy about ever expanding scopes for patents and copyrights if we got something (directly) in return.

Any royalties induce some tax fees along the way, so that already happens in theory.

Yes, corporations big and small are pretty good at reporting close to zero profit to avoid most of the taxes.

But that has still led us exactly where we are at.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#273

Post by saturnV » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #270

romwell wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They’re afraid of losing out on the revenue from selling replicas You're aware that you don't need a 3D scanner (much less a 3D scan) to produce a replica of a sculpture (..or a replica of a replica ), right? There's this ancient technique, known as casting , still in use today - which was used to produce some of the very sculptures being scanned in the first place!

There’s no public access mold of these statues though? What would a manufacturer cast _from_? A scan is effectively a digital mold, it’s the same conversation

Well, apparently the museum really wants to make sure they have a monopoly on the files, to be able to sell the official copies in their gift shop. No doubt these are of high enough quality that those could be the base of a mould?

Scans of paintings are usually considered public domain, why wouldn’t 3D scans of sculptures be different?

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#274

Post by loup-vaillant » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:04 PM UTC

So, we have one of those uncommon cases where wealth (here in the form access to culture) actually can trickle down, and our government (among other parties) is actively preventing it.

Though that’s not surprising from neo-liberal government who thinks pretty much everything should be privatised. They are after all quite explicitly about favouring the rich, and cutting off mass access to those bits of culture is but a small part of their plan to maintain and expand inequality.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#275

Post by loup-vaillant » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #105

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…

Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances. It's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter. If the State sells reproductions of Rodin's work, well…

Looks like we haven’t quite recovered from Napoleon…

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#276

Post by loup-vaillant » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

willy_k wrote: post #187

bambax wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to France! France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances. It's not corruption, exactly; it's the idea that the interests of the State are paramount, and everything else doesn't really matter. If the State sells reproductions of Rodin's work, well…

> France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances. I believe the term for that is “nanny state”.

I thought "nanny state" was a derogatory description of welfare policies?

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#277

Post by necovek » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:12 PM UTC

tirant wrote: post #251

wiz21c wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I agree(stuff bought with tax money should go to tax payers), you do realize that many people don't see it that way. Especially when their career rely on withholding the stuff in question. Another example: if people have access to 3D scans, then they might come to the museum anymore because they can make a virtual tour... (I doubt of that, but well, it's an example) But, of course, as a tax payer, I wanted t…

> The problem, I guess, is that a museum is not there to be profitable Well, the most democratic way we have found in the West to understand if a product or an initiative is relevant for the population is to see if it’s profitable (via sales or donations), or in other words, via the free market. Otherwise you are imposing on the citizens the maintenance of an organization based on the criteria from either the politic…

How do you explain the relative success of Internet Archive, Wikipedia and previously, public libraries?

Obviously not compared to profitable businesses, but instead to our appetite to support them and use them.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#278

Post by willy_k » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:21 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #276

willy_k wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France is built on the idea that the public can't be trusted, has not really reached adulthood (won't ever) and needs to be coached by an army of civil servants whose job is to protect the State and its finances. I believe the term for that is “nanny state”.

I thought "nanny state" was a derogatory description of welfare policies?

Apparently not

“Nanny state is a term of British origin that conveys a view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice. The term likens such a government to the role that a nanny has in child rearing.”

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#279

Post by necovek » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 5:16 PM UTC

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?

As illustrated in a number of cases mentioned throughout this thread, this revenue is minimal.

It is simply easier to say "no" instead of going out on a limb and saying yes and then your bosses coming at you for doing what you shouldn't have done.

Nobody will be reprimanded for saying "no", but somebody might for just granting access to these 3d scans.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#280

Post by necovek » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 5:23 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #67

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-...

It seems that with the advent/improvements in AR/VR that measuring the direct sales of scan data is the wrong way to look at the losses. If many people can experience a 75% compelling viewing of the bust (or the pyramids, Galapagos, Chichen Itza, etc.), the losses in tourism to those sites is far more than the lost sales of scan data.

There are already compelling POV videos, drone footage, and photos from wonderful angles in brilliant conditions (sunsets, no other tourists...), yet people still go and visit wven if they don't get any of the perfection that may have been captured with these art forms.

Simply, the emotions caused and felt when you experience art live, things that run through your mind and how and who with you live it, are not matched by any of the depictions you can get. Even primal senses like feeling the wind, torching sun and smell of your sweat and sand in the desert as you glance at the pyramids are far more immersive than VR will become for another couple of decades at least.