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Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court
The Rodin Museum and the French Ministry of Culture threaten freedom of information and public access to cultural heritage
I asked for help from Paris-based civil rights attorney and strategic litigation expert Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh, who made a formal demand on my behalf under French freedom of information law, which requires government agencies to communicate their administrative documents to the public. After more than three years of litigation and musée Rodin’s desperate efforts to evade the law, in April 2023 the Administrative Tribunal of Paris issued a historic, precedent-setting decision, ordering the prestigious museum to make several of its 3D scans of some of the world’s most famous sculptures accessible to the public including The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Gates of Hell. The tribunal’s legal and technological errors on the point-cloud issue alone pose a threat to public access to millions of documents containing petabytes of data from government-funded 3D surveys of the environment, oceans, the atmosphere, forests, floodplains, farmland, architecture, towns and cities, civil infrastructure, and archaeological sites, as well as the primary, archival, highest-resolution 3D scans of cultural heritage works.
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