I think the author is going overboard by framing this as some kind of righteous crusade for the public access. After all, he is interested in making profit from this. Sure, public funding paid for it, so then why should the profits be privatized?
I know that the story of an independent artist fighting a big bureaucratic public institutions is something that would get a lot of sympathy here, but this really isn't that much of a "David and Goliath" kind of tale. French heritage and research entities are underfunded and understaffed, they don't have competent lawyers, or indeed funding to afford those, as we can clearly see from this case. One litigation-happy American can run circles around them and profit from it too.
If as soon as the heritage work gets 3D scanned with French public funds, it will immediately get scooped and monetized by private sector, wouldn't the ultimate outcome be that less objects get scanned? Why would the museums even bother fighting for the digitization grant funds?
privatize: "transfer (a business, industry, or service) from public to private ownership and control."
The outcome here does not include privatizing the scans by the author! I'm not sure we read the same article
I am completely supportive of the release of the cultural heritage digitisations into the public domain, and I think mandating a release under the non-commercial license would be a good solution. Equally, I think it should be possible to license these for commercial use, at a reasonable price.
What I was trying to say with my "privatization" bit, is that the author did not intend to buy the scans from the museum, but definitely intends to monetize them, and sell the derived work, without commitment to put that work into the public domain. For me this very obvious profit motive seems incompatible with the image of the defender of the public rights that the author tries to cultivate.
And once again, I think we have to take into account that forcing the public institutions to give away their 3D scans, without cutting them in at least a little bit, will simply put a stop to the scanning campaigns.
There could be an argument that this liberalization means these projects need larger funding, but the museum took a different road.
The museums are deathly afraid of losing control over their collections, it's their main income generator. Why would the museum admin even bother going through with the 3D scanning projects, if they don't get to keep at least some commercial rights?