The Rodin Museum Files a Corrupt Defense

An update on my FOIA lawsuit in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris

Feb 04, 2022

*Detail of 3D scan of The Kiss, altered by Musée Rodin*

I’m suing Musée Rodin in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris to establish public access to its 3D scans of Auguste Rodin's sculptures.

Musée Rodin is a public institution and arm of the Ministry of Culture, which is deeply and broadly influential even outside France. The outcome of this case will affect every national museum in France and inform policies at institutions around the world. That’s why open culture orgs Wikimédia France, Communia, and La Quadrature du Net formally joined me as plaintiffs against the museum. We’re lucky to be represented in court by Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh, which gives us an almost unfair advantage.

Musée Rodin refuses to speak to the press about my case or its policies, so its court filings are the only place you can read this influential institution's actual policies on digitization and its view of the public.

I filed my case in December 2019, but only after being prodded by the Court after more than a year of delay, in March 2021 Musée Rodin finally submitted its defense. It’s a mendacious, vindictive, and deeply corrupt manifesto against digitization, openness, and the public’s right to access and use public domain works. You can read it here:

musee-rodin-memoire-en-defense.zip

Access to 3D printing to the general public seems to pose a threat to many which may have effects comparable to those suffered by the recording industry... The 3D digitization of works, even without three-dimensional printing, is likely to encourage counterfeiting (in addition to constituting, in itself, an infringement of the rights of the author...) — *Excerpt from Musée Rodin defense brief*

In May of 2021, I filed my response to the museum's defense, rebutting point by point Musée Rodin's lawlessness, its willful misrepresentations to the court, government, and public; its absurd technical incompetence; and its gross attempt at intimidation.

On Monday of this week, the court forwarded my rebuttal to the museum, so now I will share it with the public. You can read it here:

20210524-english-wenman-response-to-museum-defense.pdf

In response to my rebuttal, the court has reopened the case's "instruction" phase, giving the museum a chance to submit a response by noon, February 21, 2022. I look forward to reading it, as should anyone interested in open access, GLAM policy, FOI law, and digitization.

As its defense makes clear, in actual practice Musée Rodin's highest priority is to prop up and preserve, forever, the market value of works sold into the private collections of its clientele, the wealthiest art collectors in the world. In the museum's view, the public cannot be trusted to make use of public domain works, and you and I are either merely its potential gift shop customers, or presumed criminal counterfeiters.

With regard to Mr. Cosmo Wenman's requests, they are clearly aimed at obtaining, in a very insistent and sometimes rather unfair manner, responses from us likely to be exploited to feed his argument on the legal level in order to force certain of our American partners to accede to his demands. For my part, I doubt that Mr. Wenman's project is based only on a supposed artistic approach that he sometimes puts forward to justify his approach: there is indeed a commercial aim that is possible to appreciate in particular on the Etsy site where Mr. Wenman's items are offered for sale. As you can imagine the term "reproduction" is never mentioned. — *Excerpt from email from Musée Rodin to Conseil d'État.*

Musée Rodin’s argument to the court and the Ministry of Culture is that FOI law, the public domain, open access, and an informed public all must be subverted to protect its revenue from the cheap Rodin replicas and expensive "original" contemporary posthumous bronzes it produces and sells.

The application of this recommendation, if it were to be confirmed, would have disastrous consequences not only for the Rodin Museum's economic model, but also for other operators of the ministry such as the RMN in that it would simply provide free of charge to potential competitors and counterfeiters our production tools. In the absence of specific treatment by the legislature and taking into account the non-binding nature of the opinion given by the CADA, the Rodin museum refuses for the moment to grant the requests it receives for communication of 3D digitizations of works. However, the requestor’s reiterated solicitations for the aforementioned digitizations and 3D reproductions make me fear that this case will be brought to court and made public. That is why I am hereby seeking your advice on the position to be defended, as other cultural institutions have also had to consider these questions of communication and the reuse of the 3D digitizations of their collections. — *Excerpt from letter from Musée Rodin to Directeur général des Patrimoines, Ministry of Culture.*

But even as Musée Rodin fights this losing battle, going on five years now, I have already forced it to publish two 3D scans which it quietly posted in an unnoticed new corner of its website in May 2021. The museum only reluctantly published these few low-resolution scans in a calculated attempt to render my lawsuit moot.

Consequently, the right of communication which Mr. Wenman avails himself will no longer be exercised with the meaning of Article L. 311-2 of the CPRA from the date the documents are posted on the Museum's website. — *Excerpt from Rodin Museum defense filing*

But Musée Rodin screwed it up. It didn't publish the complete, original documents in their highest resolution, as required by law. Instead, it published low-resolution derivatives that it butchered with watermarks and misrepresented with misleading dates and descriptions.

Comparison of files Musée Rodin published versus how it represents them to the public. — *Excerpt from Wenman’s rebuttal.*

Musée Rodin had previously confirmed to the court that it held scans of three works in .STL format, and that it would put them online to avoid the court ruling on their FOI status, but the museum apparently forgot to publish one of those files: its scan of The Three Shades, shown here being 3D scanned.

*Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper’s cast of The Three Shades being 3D scanned in cooperation with Musée Rodin.*

There’s too much nonsense, bad faith, and incompetence in the museum’s defense to detail here, but in this one stroke, it demonstrated it can't be trusted to give even the court a simple, honest inventory of the few scans it admits to, or fulfill its promise to publish them.

Musée Rodin has done nothing to alert the public to the publication of these scans on this new page and would prefer it remain unnoticed outside court proceedings. But with the case moving forward, it’s a good time for me to let the public to know what’s there.

Renders of 3D scans of The Kiss and Sleep, by Cosmo Wenman

You can now download Musée Rodin's 3D scans of Auguste Rodin's The Kiss and Sleep (Le Baiser and Le Sommeil) here:

http://musee-rodin.fr/recherche/fonds-patrimoniaux-et-documentaires-du-musee/fonds-historiques-et-archives-institutionnelles/archives-institutionnelles/fichiers-3d

Note the complete absence of any license terms or restrictions on the public’s re-use of these scans of these public domain works. (Also notice that the museum mixed up Sleep’s URLs; you’ll want to download the “le_sommeil_stl.zip” file, not the “html” file.)

And while these two models are nice, but fairly low resolution, know that they are just a hint of what is to come. During research for my rebuttal to Musée Rodin’s defense, it came to light that there is reason to believe that museum has scanned its entire collection, at high resolution, in open formats, with direct funding from the Ministry of Culture. This was an astonishing revelation.

Every major sculptural work by Auguste Rodin has been 3D scanned, in every material, scale, and iteration, including fragmentary pieces and the essential, all-important foundry plasters. This is many hundreds of 3D scans now at stake in my case, possibly thousands. An archive of 3D scans of an immensely popular and influential modern artist's complete body of work, it is one of the most important collections of unpublished scans in the world, and its contents are secret.

These documents are of worldwide interest and immeasurable artistic, academic, cultural, and commercial value. I am going after all of them, for everyone.

Final statement of Wenman's rebuttal, asking the court to annul Musée Rodin's refusals, and to asses penalties and requesting the museum pay Wenman's legal expenses. — *Conclusion of Wenman’s rebuttal.*

Cosmo Wenman is CEO of Concept Realizations. He can be contacted at twitter.com/CosmoWenman and cosmo.wenman@gmail.com

If you enjoyed this story, please share it and consider subscribing. For strategic reasons, I am not always able to publish the case’s developments in real time. But when I am able to share important developments, I will write about them here.

The Rodin Museum Files a Corrupt Defense

An update on my FOIA lawsuit in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris

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