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.
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?
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.
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?
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....
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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....
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.
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…
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!