1 Comment

The work you are doing here is incredible. The quality of rebuttals to the museum's absolutely absurd claims is admirable.

It is mind-blowing that the court agreed with you in the majority of your points and then just excluded a type of 3D scan of their own volition. One has to wonder if anything shady is going on. A hypothetical instance of the museum telling the court "Okay, approve releasing the scans except for this one type" behind closed doors seems no less ridiculous of a reason for restriction than a number of their other claims as to why they can't release some/all of their scans.

I love the international implications as well. As you outlined, one would hope that museums borrowing works that are concerned about releasing their own publicly funded scans would at least have a legal precedent in the country of origin to point to, should anyone have a problem with it.

Thank you for doing this work. It is so frustrating that it has to be done, and frustrating that the court seems to have little interest in actually holding the museum accountable to court deadlines and decisions. I hope that changes.

As someone who has worked in museums, done 3D scanning himself, and has a great interest in open access to data, especially publicly-funded data, this was an incredibly interesting read. Thank you for documenting your work here and for doing this incredible, and incredibly important work.

And finally, it is just a sad type of hilarious that one of their arguments to the court was "Oh, sorry. We are actually incredibly incompetent in several key areas of what is literally our job."

Expand full comment