Top public museums have the artifacts and they have the resources to make high-resolution 3D scans of them. For all its historical sins, the British Museum offers hundreds of downloads under Creative Commons licenses. The Smithsonian has thousands of public domain 3D scans for the taking. Lavishly-funded museums in France and Germany, though, have jealously guarded their own scans in what Cosmo Wenman describes as a quiet but mendacious campaign of evasions, delays, deceptions, and lawless special pleading—even in the face of court action. This "smokescreen of legal and technological nonsense" could offer other public officials the legal tools and tricks to conceal any common digital public resource.
So much more is now at stake than public access to 3D scans of a few popular sculptures, or preserving the 19th-century business model of one intransigent museum. One museum could have lawless and reactionary administrators opposed to public oversight and public access, with no vision or planning for the future or innovation in the arts, and the damage might be reasonably contained to the loss of scans of its own collection. But with its deceptive arguments, reckless tactics, and the approval of the Ministry of Culture, musée Rodin managed to distract and confuse the tribunal with dangerous implications on a much larger scale.
The public and the Conseil d'État need to understand that the tribunal's reasoning would fundamentally undermine the public's right to access administrative documents and hinder its ability to monitor the government's activities in countless sectors. The lower court's errors would subject the public's right to access administrative documents to the arbitrary whims of administrations that could simply hide, obfuscate, or misrepresent their holdings and their "intentions" for documents as a means of blocking public inquiry. The tribunal's decision would also set a precedent allowing regional courts to simply invent their own legal standards on a case-by-case basis, based on total unfamiliarity with both well-established and emerging technologies, without giving litigants or the public a chance to respond.
At the fancy museum end, an elitist hoarding culture is given commercial focus in gift shops and licensing deals, though the funny part is that they're terrible at making money. But the fight attracts friends in higher places with more broadly authoritarian objectives: if the courts or legislators give an inch to public museums wanting to hide the public records they generate, other institutions will take a mile.
