Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D Scan Verdict

Cosmo Wenman recounts an eight-year legal battle to force the Rodin Museum to disclose publicly funded 3D scans of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures. Beginning in 2017, repeated freedom-of-information requests met with what Wenman documents as systematic falsehoods: the museum alternately insisted scans didn’t exist, were technologically unreadable, or posed counterfeiting and commercial-risk concerns, even while its funding applications and third-party images demonstrated high-resolution laser-scanned point-cloud files in open, plaintext formats. France’s Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) sided with disclosure, and in December 2023 the Paris Administrative Tribunal formally ordered release of a variety of scan formats and awarded Wenman €1,500; the museum and Ministry of Culture ignored that order.

On appeal to the Conseil d’État, the court departed from precedent and expert evidence. The court’s rapporteur public famously invoked Magritte - “sometimes a document is not a document” - and proposed novel exceptions, asserting point clouds were not administrative documents and that providing them would be unduly burdensome. Despite testimony showing that governments and heritage programs routinely publish point-cloud data and that the Ministry itself produces guidance and open-source tools, the high court ruled the scans are legally equivalent to physical reproductions and part of the museum’s inalienable collection, placing them outside FOI. The decision nullifies the lower-court victory, contradicts CADA’s prior analyses, and keeps the case dossier and the scans inaccessible.