I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care <i>so much</i> 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.<p>What is less clear is why the <i>high court</i>, 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.
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.<p>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 <i>might</i> 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.<p>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 <i>they intended it as a digital copy</i> 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?<p>Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…