Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas.

Sounds like a pretty good reason

Understandable perhaps, "good" enough to completely ignore copyright law, no.

The article is long, but from TFA

The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position...

What copyright law? If I possess an out-of-copyright document, nothing requires me to make a copy for you when you ask me.

They're ignoring the French freedom-of-information law; copyright law doesn't even touch the issue.

As if it would be more difficult to just buy the thing from the gift shop and make copies of that. With a physical object you can make molds directly from that without having to figure out how to turn a point-cloud file into a physical object.

It's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.

My point, perhaps badly made, was that copyright law has expired, therefore it should be in the public domain.

Except it turns out they also make basically no money from this right now - it's not a meaningful portion of their funding or other monetary support.

This is actually true of most large art museums. SF MoMa makes only 7% of revenue (not actual dollars in funding) from their gift shop and that number only goes in one direction over the years.

Smaller art museums often depend more but that is also changing.

So It's just another nonsense argument

It's also an argument, that even if you granted all there premises - could be quantifiable.

If the gift shop makes $x per year in toto, and some percentage is (or could be) 3D scans, you now have a maximum dollar amount that they can possibly be worth (by calculating the cost of a perpetual annuity). Can't be more - and so even in the worst case you've changed it from a "we will never" to a "we want $x before we do" question.

Being in the public domain doesn't mean someone has to give you a copy.

No, that's why the author is using freedom of information laws to accomplish his goals. If you are a government institution - and these museums are - in a country with freedom of information laws, then it follows that you can be compelled to comply with them by the courts.