The Federal Trade Commission to­day an­nounced a fi­nal “click-to-cancel” rule that will re­quire sell­ers to make it as easy for con­sumers to can­cel their en­roll­ment as it was to sign up. Most of the fi­nal rule’s pro­vi­sions will go into ef­fect 180 days af­ter it is pub­lished in the Federal Register.

“Too of­ten, busi­nesses make peo­ple jump through end­less hoops just to can­cel a sub­scrip­tion,” said Commission Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, sav­ing Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck pay­ing for a ser­vice they no longer want.”

The Commission’s up­dated rule will ap­ply to al­most all neg­a­tive op­tion pro­grams in any me­dia. The rule also will pro­hibit sell­ers from mis­rep­re­sent­ing any ma­te­r­ial facts while us­ing neg­a­tive op­tion mar­ket­ing; re­quire sell­ers to pro­vide im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion be­fore ob­tain­ing con­sumers’ billing in­for­ma­tion and charg­ing them; and re­quire sell­ers to get con­sumers’ in­formed con­sent to the neg­a­tive op­tion fea­tures be­fore charg­ing them.

The fi­nal rule an­nounced to­day is part of the FTC’s on­go­ing re­view of its 1973 Negative Option Rule, which the agency is mod­ern­iz­ing to com­bat un­fair or de­cep­tive prac­tices re­lated to sub­scrip­tions, mem­ber­ships, and other re­cur­ring-pay­ment pro­grams in an in­creas­ingly dig­i­tal econ­omy where it’s eas­ier than ever for busi­nesses to sign up con­sumers for their prod­ucts and ser­vices.

Commission ap­proval and pub­li­ca­tion fol­lows the March 2023 an­nounce­ment of a no­tice of pro­posed rule­mak­ing which re­sulted in more than 16,000 com­ments from con­sumers and fed­eral and state gov­ern­ment agen­cies, con­sumer groups, and trade as­so­ci­a­tions.

While neg­a­tive op­tion mar­ket­ing pro­grams can be con­ve­nient for sell­ers and con­sumers, the FTC re­ceives thou­sands of com­plaints about neg­a­tive op­tion and re­cur­ring sub­scrip­tion prac­tices each year. The num­ber of com­plaints has been steadily in­creas­ing over the past five years and in 2024 the Commission re­ceived nearly 70 con­sumer com­plaints per day on av­er­age, up from 42 per day in 2021.

The fi­nal rule will pro­vide a con­sis­tent le­gal frame­work by pro­hibit­ing sell­ers from:

* mis­rep­re­sent­ing any ma­te­r­ial fact made while mar­ket­ing goods or ser­vices with a neg­a­tive op­tion fea­ture;

* fail­ing to clearly and con­spic­u­ously dis­close ma­te­r­ial terms prior to ob­tain­ing a con­sumer’s billing in­for­ma­tion in con­nec­tion with a neg­a­tive op­tion fea­ture;

* fail­ing to ob­tain a con­sumer’s ex­press in­formed con­sent to the neg­a­tive op­tion fea­ture be­fore charg­ing the con­sumer; and

* fail­ing to pro­vide a sim­ple mech­a­nism to can­cel the neg­a­tive op­tion fea­ture and im­me­di­ately halt charges.

Following an eval­u­a­tion of pub­lic com­ments, the Commission has voted to adopt a fi­nal rule with cer­tain changes, most no­tably drop­ping a re­quire­ment that sell­ers pro­vide an­nual re­minders to con­sumers of the neg­a­tive op­tion fea­ture of their sub­scrip­tion, and drop­ping a pro­hi­bi­tion on sell­ers telling con­sumers seek­ing to can­cel their sub­scrip­tion about plan mod­i­fi­ca­tions or rea­sons to keep to their ex­ist­ing agree­ment with­out first ask­ing if they want to hear about them.

The Commission vote ap­prov­ing pub­li­ca­tion of the fi­nal rule in the Federal Register was 3-2, with Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew N. Ferguson vot­ing no. Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter is­sued a sep­a­rate state­ment and Commissioner Holyoak is­sued a sep­a­rate dis­sent­ing state­ment. Commissioner Ferguson’s dis­sent­ing state­ment is forth­com­ing.

FTC staff has de­vel­oped a fact sheet sum­ma­riz­ing the changes to the rule. The pri­mary staffer on this mat­ter is Katherine Johnson in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

While Adobe’s an­nual MAX con­fer­ence gives the com­pany a chance to un­veil its lat­est fea­tures, it also lets the brand demon­strate some of its more weird and won­der­ful ideas. ‘Sneaks’ sees Adobe en­gi­neers take to the stage to share ideas that may or may not see the light of day, such as 2024′s Project Turntable. Creative Bloq en­joyed an ex­clu­sive pre­view of the con­cept in ahead of its un­veil­ing at MAX, and it’s one of the most im­pres­sive Sneaks we’ve seen.

Project Turntable lets users eas­ily ro­tate 2D vec­tor art in 3D, whilst en­sur­ing it still look like 2D art from any new an­gle. And even af­ter the ro­ta­tion, the vec­tor graph­ics stay true to the orig­i­nal shape, main­tain­ing the de­sign’s orig­i­nal essence.

In the ex­am­ple above, a 2D vec­tor of an il­lus­trated war­rior is ro­tated to face a dragon. While spin­ning, the vec­tor im­age ap­pears to be a 3D ob­ject, but the sta­tic im­age the user set­tles on will be com­pletely flat. Truly im­pres­sive is how the tool uses AI to fill in the ‘gaps’ in the im­age — in an­other ex­am­ple, a 2D horse with only two vis­i­bly legs is ro­tated to re­veal four.

The tool was cre­ated by Adobe re­search sci­en­tist Zhiqin Chen. Adobe’s Brian Domingo told Creative Bloq that like other Adobe Innovation pro­ject, there’s still no guar­an­tee that this fea­ture will be re­leased com­mer­cially — but the team ex­pects it to gen­er­ate a ton of in­ter­est at Adobe Max.

From Automatic Image Distraction Removal, and a new Generative Workspace, Adobe has al­ready an­nounced over 100 new cre­ator-first fea­tures this week. And with huge an­nounce­ments from other brands in­clud­ing Tesla and Meta, this has ar­guably been one of the biggest weeks for AI we’ve seen so far.

For the last seven years, I have been cam­paign­ing to es­tab­lish and de­fend the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess all French na­tional mu­se­ums’ 3D scans of their col­lec­tions, start­ing with the pres­ti­gious and in­flu­en­tial Rodin Museum in Paris. My ef­forts have reached the Conseil d’É­tat, France’s supreme court for ad­min­is­tra­tive jus­tice, and a great deal is at stake. The mu­seum and the French Ministry of Culture ap­pear de­ter­mined to lie, break the law, defy court or­ders, and set fire to French free­dom of in­for­ma­tion law in or­der to pre­vent the pub­lic from ac­cess­ing 3D scans of cul­tural her­itage.

Many mu­se­ums around the world make high-qual­ity 3D scans of im­por­tant art­work and an­cient ar­ti­facts in their col­lec­tions. Several for­ward-think­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions freely share their 3D scans, al­low­ing the pub­lic to view, copy, adapt, and ex­per­i­ment with the un­der­ly­ing works in ways that have never be­fore been pos­si­ble.

Anyone in the world with an in­ter­net con­nec­tion can view, in­ter­act with, and down­load the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for ex­am­ple. The pub­lic can freely ac­cess hun­dreds of scans of clas­si­cal sculp­ture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and vis­i­tors to the Smithsonian’s web­site can view, nav­i­gate, and freely down­load thou­sands of high-qual­ity scans of ar­ti­facts rang­ing from di­nosaur fos­sils to the Apollo 11 space cap­sule.

With ac­cess to dig­i­ti­za­tions like these, artists can re­work and in­cor­po­rate our com­mon cul­tural her­itage into new works, such as films, video games, vir­tual re­al­ity, cloth­ing, ar­chi­tec­ture, sculp­ture, and more. Researchers and ed­u­ca­tors can use 3D scans to fur­ther our un­der­stand­ing of the arts, and the art-lov­ing pub­lic can use them to ap­pre­ci­ate, study, and even repli­cate beloved works in new ways that are not pos­si­ble within the con­fines of a mu­seum or with the orig­i­nal works.

For ex­am­ple, I de­sign and fab­ri­cate uni­ver­sal ac­cess wayfind­ing tools, in­ter­ac­tive repli­cas and ex­hibits for the blind. I know that there is need for un­fet­tered ac­cess to 3D scans of im­por­tant sculp­tures and ar­ti­facts for use in mak­ing repli­cas the pub­lic can ex­plore through touch.

If set loose to run free in our dig­i­tal, vi­sual, and tac­tile land­scape, the cre­ative po­ten­tial for cul­tural her­itage 3D scans is lim­it­less, and the value of what the gen­eral pub­lic can do with them vastly ex­ceeds what mu­se­ums could ever cre­ate if they kept their dig­i­ti­za­tions for them­selves.

Unfortunately, some os­ten­si­bly pub­lic-spir­ited or­ga­ni­za­tions do keep their 3D scans hid­den. I’ve been try­ing to help them see the light. Beginning in 2017 I spent three years us­ing German free­dom of in­for­ma­tion law to suc­cess­fully pres­sure the Egyptian Museum of Berlin to re­lease its 3D scan of its most prized pos­ses­sion and na­tional trea­sure, the 3,000 year-old Bust of Nefertiti. Since then I’ve turned my at­ten­tion to the dig­i­tal trea­sures be­ing hoarded by tax­payer funded in­sti­tu­tions in France.

The Louvre, for ex­am­ple, will not al­low the pub­lic to ac­cess its ul­tra-high qual­ity 3D scan of Winged Victory, the Nike of Samothrace, de­spite its ag­gres­sive pub­lic and cor­po­rate fundrais­ing cam­paign to dig­i­tize the iconic Greek sculp­ture. Nor its scan of Venus de Milo.

The French Ministry of Culture’s Réunion des musées na­tionaux (RMN) re­ceives tens of mil­lions of dol­lars an­u­ally in pub­lic sub­si­dies to pro­vide ser­vices to French na­tional mu­se­ums. In 2013 RMN re­ceived from the Fonds na­tional pour la so­ciété numérique (FSN) a €1.1M sub­sidy and an ad­di­tional loan of €1.1M to dig­i­tize ob­jects in French mu­seum col­lec­tions and cre­ate a web plat­form for the pub­li­ca­tion and eco­nomic ex­ploita­tion of its 3D scans. Since then RMN has 3D scanned thou­sands of art­works and an­cient ar­ti­facts all over France. RMN ad­ver­tises its scans’ avail­abil­ity to the pub­lic, which makes for great PR, but its ads are false. In fact, RMN has a strict look-but-don’t-touch pol­icy for its 3D scans and ab­solutely re­fuses to al­low the pub­lic to ac­cess them di­rectly. My own in­ves­ti­ga­tion has re­vealed that, 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. For prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tions and cre­ative po­ten­tial, and di­rect value to the pub­lic, it is as though these scans sim­ply do not ex­ist.

And then there is the Rodin Museum. Founded in 1917 shortly af­ter the death of famed sculp­tor Auguste Rodin, le musée Rodin is a state-run ad­min­is­tra­tive agency and an arm of the Ministry of Culture. It has a legally man­dated mis­sion to pre­serve, study, en­hance and dis­sem­i­nate Rodin’s works, all of which have been in the pub­lic do­main since their copy­rights ex­pired decades ago. Even though musée Rodin never passes up an op­por­tu­nity to re­mind the pub­lic that it is France’s sole “self-funded” na­tional mu­seum, it sought and ob­tained di­rect pub­lic fund­ing from the Ministry of Culture’s na­tional dig­i­ti­za­tion pro­gram, and in 2010 as part of its pub­lic ser­vice mis­sion be­gan 3D scan­ning its col­lec­tion with the stated pur­pose of pub­lish­ing the re­sults.

Fourteen years later, musée Rodin’s scans have not been shared with the pub­lic.

When I ap­proach cul­tural her­itage or­ga­ni­za­tions about their 3D scans of pub­lic do­main works, my ul­ti­mate goal is to se­cure un­fet­tered pub­lic ac­cess to them. I’m much less in­ter­ested in half mea­sures, whereby the pub­lic might be granted ac­cess to scans only for, say, ed­u­ca­tional pur­poses, but be im­prop­erly pro­hib­ited from us­ing them com­mer­cially. Those kinds of com­pro­mises un­der­mine the pub­lic’s right to reuse pub­lic do­main works and can lead to peo­ple hes­i­tat­ing to use them in any way be­cause they are un­sure of their rights and fear un­known pun­ish­ments.

In 2017, I ap­proached musée Rodin with a strat­egy to elicit a full air­ing of every pos­si­ble ar­gu­ment that a pres­ti­gious, well-po­si­tioned pub­lic in­sti­tu­tion might bring to bear against a mem­ber of the pub­lic in­ter­ested in ac­cess­ing its 3D scans. I wanted to dis­cover and deal with all their con­cerns at once. So, from the start I made it per­fectly clear to musée Rodin that I had a com­mer­cial in­ter­est in scans of Rodin’s works, and I made ab­solutely no apolo­gies for it. From there I asked its ad­min­is­tra­tors straight­for­ward ques­tions about the mu­se­um’s poli­cies and let them treat me as they might treat any other in­quir­ing mem­ber of the pub­lic. It did not go well.

I ex­pected re­sis­tance, but I did not an­tic­i­pate the ex­tent to which the mu­seum would abuse its au­thor­ity.

After more than a year of musée Rodin’s ad­min­is­tra­tors ig­nor­ing my re­quests for in­for­ma­tion about its 3D scans and pub­lic ac­cess-re­lated poli­cies, I de­cided to es­ca­late. I asked for help from Paris-based civil rights at­tor­ney and strate­gic lit­i­ga­tion ex­pert Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh, who made a for­mal de­mand on my be­half un­der French free­dom of in­for­ma­tion law, which re­quires gov­ern­ment agen­cies to com­mu­ni­cate their ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments to the pub­lic. We re­quested copies of the mu­se­um’s pol­icy-re­lated doc­u­ments, a list of the 3D scan files it held, and the scan files them­selves.

When musée Rodin re­fused to pro­vide records of any kind we re­ferred its re­fusal to the Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA), the in­de­pen­dent French gov­ern­ment agency that ad­min­is­tra­tions and courts rely on for its le­gal analy­sis of ques­tions re­lat­ing to pub­lic ac­cess and reuse of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments. The CADA had never be­fore con­sid­ered any dis­pute about 3D scans. It af­firmed my re­quest that musée Rodin com­mu­ni­cate copies of its scans to me, de­ter­min­ing for the first time that pub­lic agen­cies’ 3D scans are in fact ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments and by law must be made avail­able to the pub­lic.

In light of the gov­ern­men­t’s own le­gal analy­sis, musée Rodin con­fided to the min­istry — in writ­ing — its plan to dis­obey the law and its fear that I would bring it to court and make its po­si­tion known to the pub­lic.

In 2019 we filed suit against the mu­seum in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris, ask­ing the court to anul the mu­se­um’s re­fusals and or­der it to make its scans pub­lic. Open cul­ture and dig­i­tal rights ad­vo­cacy or­ga­ni­za­tions Communia, La Quadrature du Net and Wikimédia France joined me as co-plain­tiffs in sup­port of our case. We were all rep­re­sented by Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh.

After more than three years of lit­i­ga­tion and musée Rodin’s des­per­ate ef­forts to evade the law, in April 2023 the Administrative Tribunal of Paris is­sued a his­toric, prece­dent-set­ting de­ci­sion, or­der­ing the pres­ti­gious mu­seum to make sev­eral of its 3D scans of some of the world’s most fa­mous sculp­tures ac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic in­clud­ing The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Gates of Hell. The Administrative Tribunal’s April 21, 2023 de­ci­sion is avail­able here.

Our vic­tory has broad im­pli­ca­tions for pub­lic ac­cess to and reuse of dig­i­ti­za­tions of im­por­tant cul­tural her­itage works through­out France and the world.

Naturally, we wanted to pub­li­cize the court’s 2023 de­ci­sion at that time, but for strate­gic rea­sons re­mained silent be­cause our vic­tory was not com­plete. Despite the im­por­tant rul­ings af­firm­ing the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess 3D scans, the tri­bunal also ruled against us on sev­eral re­lated is­sues with rea­son­ing that, if left un­chal­lenged, threat­ens to broadly un­der­mine French free­dom of in­for­ma­tion law as well as per­mit the gov­ern­ment to con­ceal a spe­cific type of im­por­tant doc­u­ment from the pub­lic — more on that in a mo­ment.

When the tri­bunal is­sued its de­ci­sion, Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh and I re­mained silent be­cause we did not want to give the gov­ern­ment ad­vance no­tice that we in­tended to con­test the flawed por­tions of the de­ci­sion. We also wanted to qui­etly ob­serve as musée Rodin’s dead­line passed with­out it ini­ti­at­ing an ap­peal of its own. In the months fol­low­ing the tri­bunal’s April 2023 de­ci­sion, Fitzjean and I spent count­less hours qui­etly re­search­ing, gath­er­ing ex­pert tes­ti­mony, and prepar­ing an analy­sis and pre­sen­ta­tion of an ap­peal chal­leng­ing the lower court’s le­gal and pro­ce­dural er­rors. We en­gaged Fitzjean’s col­leagues at the law firm SCP Marlange - de La Burgade — spe­cial­ists in ap­peals to the Conseil d’É­tat, France’s supreme court for ad­min­is­tra­tive jus­tice — for as­sis­tance and to pre­sent our case to the court. On December 1, 2023 we sub­mit­ted our brief to the Conseil d’É­tat for its pre­lim­i­nary re­view and its de­ci­sion on the ad­miss­abil­ity of our ap­peal and the need for a hear­ing.

From the be­gin­ning of this seven-year ef­fort, through to­day, musée Rodin has re­fused to give any com­ment to the press about its se­cret ac­cess poli­cies or le­gal de­fense. In ef­fect, the mu­se­um’s ad­min­is­tra­tors have qui­etly trans­ferred their press com­mu­ni­ca­tions, pol­icy de­ci­sions, and le­gal re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to me, my at­tor­ney and co-plain­tiffs, and the court, while mak­ing every ef­fort to evade the law. But be­hind the scenes, in court, and when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with other arms of the gov­ern­ment, how­ever, musée Rodin has been re­lent­lessly men­da­cious, ly­ing to the Ministry of Culture, the gov­ern­ment, the court, and the pub­lic it is meant to serve.

Now that we have chal­lenged the lower court’s er­rors and await a re­sponse from the Ministry of Culture and its proxy, musée Rodin, I can fi­nally give a full ac­count of our im­por­tant achieve­ments in the tri­bunal and ex­pose the mu­se­um’s de­cep­tive tac­tics, all of which should be of in­ter­est to pol­i­cy­mak­ers and pro­fes­sion­als in the cul­tural her­itage sec­tor and the art mar­ket, open ac­cess ad­vo­cates, as well as archivists, ed­u­ca­tors, and the art-lov­ing pub­lic.

I can also now tell the pub­lic about the tri­bunal’s er­rors and lack of tech­ni­cal un­der­stand­ing and the dan­ger they pose. What is cur­rently at stake in my ap­peal to the Conseil d’É­tat should be of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est to sci­en­tists, re­searchers, cit­i­zen ac­tivists, in­ves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists, and gov­ern­ment watch­dog or­ga­ni­za­tions.

We had to fight the mu­se­um’s con­stant eva­sions, de­lays, de­cep­tions, and law­less spe­cial plead­ing for each and every le­gal ques­tion we won. I re­count be­low the three judges’ find­ings and their ef­fects, some of musée Rodin’s failed le­gal and ex­trale­gal ma­neu­vers, and how we coun­tered them. I hope this sum­mary will be help­ful to oth­ers’ ef­forts to ac­cess doc­u­ments of any kind from sim­i­larly un­co­op­er­a­tive and hos­tile ad­min­is­tra­tive agen­cies.

We de­fin­i­tively de­stroyed droit moral (moral rights) as a le­gal bar­rier to pub­lic ac­cess and reuse of 3D scans of pub­lic do­main cul­tural her­itage works. This is an in­cred­i­ble achieve­ment in it­self; no one in the world has a stronger claim to the le­gal pro­tec­tions and priv­i­leges of droit moral than musée Rodin, one of the most ac­tive, pow­er­ful, rec­og­niz­able, and pres­ti­gious pub­lic do­main artist’s es­tates in the world. The mu­seum con­stantly re­minded the court that it is the le­gal, state-ap­pointed ben­e­fi­ciary of Auguste Rodin’s es­tate and per­pet­ual moral rights, which in­clude the right to at­tri­bu­tion and the right to pro­tect the in­tegrity of an au­thor’s works. For dra­matic ef­fect, musée Rodin sub­mit­ted into ev­i­dence Rodin’s hand­writ­ten 1916 do­na­tion of his es­tate to the French state. Yet the court cor­rectly con­sid­ered droit moral to be ut­terly ir­rel­e­vant to the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess and reuse works whose copy­rights have ex­pired and which have en­tered the pub­lic do­main. This el­e­ment of the court’s de­ci­sion un­der­cuts count­less or­ga­ni­za­tions’ hes­i­tancy and dither­ing on pub­lic ac­cess to pub­lic do­main works, some­times vaguely jus­ti­fied as def­er­ence to artists’ es­tates and poorly un­der­stood, al­most mys­ti­cal claims of droit moral. Institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art, for ex­am­ple, which has been too timid to pub­lish its own 3D scan of The Thinker due to un­founded fear of some­how vi­o­lat­ing musée Rodin’s moral rights, should take note.

Musée Rodin ar­gued that pub­lic ac­cess to its 3D scans would have “conséquences désas­treuses” for all French na­tional mu­se­ums by sub­ject­ing their gift shop and art­work sales rev­enue to un­fair com­pe­ti­tion from the pub­lic, and that their scans would fa­cil­i­tate crim­i­nal coun­ter­feit­ing. 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 that makes the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess and reuse pub­lic do­main works crys­tal clear. This el­e­ment of the court’s rul­ing si­mul­ta­ne­ously neu­tral­izes ad­min­is­tra­tive agen­cies’ per­pet­ual, self-serv­ing pleas of poverty and de­nies their abil­ity to with­hold doc­u­ments and cul­tural her­itage dig­i­ti­za­tions based on prospec­tive mis­use by the pub­lic — in­clud­ing prospec­tive crim­i­nal mis­use by the per­son re­quest­ing ac­cess. On this point the court echoed the ex­act ob­jec­tion I made to musée Rodin’s then-di­rec­tor in my very first re­quests to the mu­seum: courts, not ad­min­is­tra­tive agen­cies nor mu­se­ums, ad­ju­di­cate crimes and only af­ter a crime has been al­leged, not in ad­vance.

The court noted that musée Rodin had ob­vi­ously cre­ated its 3D scans in the con­text of its pub­lic ser­vice mis­sion to dis­sem­i­nate Rodin’s works and ruled the mu­seum could not with­hold them on the grounds that they would ex­pose trade se­crets re­lated to their com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions. In an ironic de­vel­op­ment, the judges specif­i­cally rea­soned against musée Rodin’s trade se­crecy claim by cit­ing its 3D dig­i­ti­za­tion fund­ing ap­pli­ca­tions to the Ministry of Culture, in which the mu­seum stip­u­lated its com­mit­ment to pub­lish­ing its scans. The mu­seum had at­tempted to hide these fund­ing ap­pli­ca­tions from us and the court, telling the court they did not ex­ist. However, in the course of the trial we ob­tained those ap­pli­ca­tions by forc­ing a par­al­lel doc­u­ments re­quest di­rectly to the Ministry of Culture — which the mu­seum com­plained to the court was a “crude ma­neu­ver” — ex­pos­ing the mu­se­um’s de­cep­tion and badly wound­ing the de­fense on this crit­i­cal is­sue. Defeating the mu­se­um’s trade se­crecy de­fense sig­nif­i­cantly nar­rows the scope of this le­gal ex­cep­tion to the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess 3D scans and other ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments, which other pow­er­ful cul­tural her­itage or­ga­ni­za­tions would likely at­tempt to abuse in sim­i­lar cases.

The court re­jected musée Rodin’s ar­gu­ment that it could not pub­lish sev­eral 3D scan doc­u­ments be­cause they were in a closed for­mat that re­quired third-party soft­ware to open. By ad­vanc­ing this ab­surd de­fense, the mu­seum re­vealed its ut­ter hos­til­ity to pub­lic trans­parency, reck­lessly propos­ing a broad ex­cep­tion to the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments that would ren­der it com­pletely use­less. Imagine the dam­age to pub­lic over­sight if the gov­ern­ment could legally hide em­bar­rass­ing doc­u­ments merely by keep­ing them in file for­mats that re­quired pro­pri­etary soft­ware to open. The court re­jected the mu­se­um’s ar­gu­ment and specif­i­cally or­dered it to make those same pro­pri­etary 3D files ac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.

In the course of the trial, musée Rodin at­tempted to neu­tral­ize an el­e­ment of our case by qui­etly pub­lish­ing a small set of 3D scans on its web­site, in­clud­ing The Kiss and Sleep. It hoped that by pub­lish­ing them it would re­move them from the dis­pute and avoid the court rul­ing specif­i­cally on the com­mu­ni­ca­bil­ity of 3D files in .STL for­mat, com­monly used in 3D print­ing. But in a strate­gic blun­der, the mu­seum could not re­sist edit­ing these few files prior to pub­lish­ing them. We alerted the court to these mod­i­fi­ca­tions, and it ruled not only that .STL files are com­mu­ni­ca­ble ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments, but also that the law re­quires the mu­seum to com­mu­ni­cate its orig­i­nal, un­al­tered scan doc­u­ments.

Musée Rodin told the court that all of its other dig­i­tal 3D scan files were “unfinished” — and there­fore could law­fully be with­held from the pub­lic — be­cause they had not been edited to in­clude vis­i­ble, in­deli­ble in­scrip­tions of “Reproduction” on the sculp­tures’ scanned, dig­i­tal sur­faces. It claimed that the law against coun­ter­feit­ing re­quired such marks to pre­vent repli­cas from be­ing mis­rep­re­sented as orig­i­nals and that with­out them, a dig­i­tal, 3D scan doc­u­ment it­self would con­sti­tute a crim­i­nal coun­ter­feit. Those claims were non­sen­si­cal, of course, not only since it’s ob­vi­ous that no one could mis­take a dig­i­tal file for a phys­i­cal ar­ti­fact, but also be­cause van­dal­iz­ing a scan by dig­i­tally carv­ing the word “Reproduction” on it would be com­pletely at odds with scan­ning prac­tices in re­search, con­ser­va­tion, and cul­tural her­itage con­texts where fi­delity to the orig­i­nal sub­ject is para­mount.

On the sup­posed le­gal re­quire­ment for “Reproduction” marks on 3D scans, the mu­seum could only cite pol­icy guid­ance from the Ministry of Culture, in the con­ve­nient form of a “Charter of best prac­tices in 3D print­ing” pro­duced by the min­istry’s High Council of Literary and Artistic Property (CSPLA). Years ear­lier, when I had learned that the mu­seum it­self was con­tribut­ing to the CSPLA’s pol­icy rec­om­men­da­tions, I alerted the CSPLA and ob­jected to the mu­se­um’s ob­vi­ous con­flict of in­ter­est, warn­ing that the mu­seum would at­tempt to pro­pose poli­cies crafted specif­i­cally to retroac­tively op­pose my re­quests for ac­cess. Later, in trial, as pre­dicted, musée Rodin cited the CSPLA’s “charter” and sub­mit­ted it as ev­i­dence in sup­port of the idea that “Reproduction” marks are needed on 3D scans. The mu­seum sub­mit­ted this ev­i­dence with­out dis­clos­ing to the court that it had it­self co-au­thored that self-serv­ing — and, frankly, ab­surd — guid­ance.

The court com­pletely re­jected musée Rodin’s claims about marks of “Reproduction” on scans, echo­ing my ear­lier warn­ings to the CSPLA, specif­i­cally not­ing that the min­istry’s pol­icy rec­om­men­da­tions were ir­rel­e­vant be­cause they had been is­sued years af­ter the scans’ com­ple­tion and could not be ap­plied retroac­tively.

* Imperfection of scans and tech­no­log­i­cal in­com­pe­tence: de­feated with ev­i­dence from London

Musée Rodin also ar­gued that many of its 3D scan doc­u­ments were in­com­plete and there­fore non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble be­cause they are in text for­mat, have gaps in their sur­face mea­sure­ments where the sculp­tures were not scanned in their en­tirety, and are gen­er­ally mediocre in qual­ity.

Incredibly, the mu­seum also ar­gued its scan doc­u­ments were non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble be­cause they are sup­pos­edly un­us­able since the mu­se­um’s own anony­mous tech­ni­cal con­sul­tants claimed they did not know how to use them. An as­ton­ish­ing set of plead­ings; imag­ine the think­ing in­volved in ar­gu­ing that doc­u­ments may be con­cealed from the pub­lic be­cause they are in a uni­ver­sally ac­ces­si­ble text for­mat, or be­cause the ad­min­is­tra­tive agency that holds them is too in­com­pe­tent to use them.

In re­sponse to the mu­se­um’s non­sen­si­cal tech­no­log­i­cal claims, we sub­mit­ted ex­pert tes­ti­mony from Professor Michael Kazhdan, full pro­fes­sor of com­puter graph­ics in the de­part­ment of com­puter sci­ence at Johns Hopkins University and co-de­vel­oper of the Poisson Surface Reconstruction al­go­rithm, which is used world­wide in 3D scan data analy­sis. Professor Kazhdan ex­plained to the court that doc­u­ments in plain­text for­mat are fun­da­men­tally well suited for pre­serv­ing scan data, and that such doc­u­ments are eas­ily ex­ploitable by ex­perts and am­a­teurs alike. He also ex­plained that gaps in scanned sur­faces are a nor­mal, ex­pected, and ubiq­ui­tous phe­nom­e­non in 3D scan­ning and are not con­sid­ered to ren­der a scan doc­u­ment “incomplete” or un­us­able.

We also sub­mit­ted tes­ti­mony from artist and 3D scan­ning ex­pert Ghislain Moret de Rocheprise, who ex­plained that plain­text for­mat is the ex­act for­mat the Ministry of Culture it­self rec­om­mends for 3D scanned point-cloud doc­u­ments and that it is com­monly used by the gen­eral pub­lic as well as in­dus­try and gov­ern­ment pre­cisely be­cause it is open, non-pro­pri­etary, and easy to pre­serve and ac­cess.

On the ques­tion of the sup­posed use­less­ness of so-called in­com­plete 3D scans, we also sub­mit­ted as ev­i­dence cor­re­spon­dence from 2020 be­tween musée Rodin and the Tate London mu­seum, which I ob­tained through a sep­a­rate UK Freedom of Information Act re­quest to the Tate. In that cor­re­spon­dence, Tate re­quested per­mis­sion to 3D scan sev­eral sculp­tures on loan from musée Rodin, so that Tate could cre­ate dig­i­tal ren­ders of the works for use in a pro­mo­tional video. Musée Rodin granted Tate that per­mis­sion on the ex­press con­di­tion that the sculp­tures not be scanned in their en­tirety. This di­rectly con­tra­dicted musée Rodin’s po­si­tion in court, demon­strat­ing that it fully rec­og­nizes the util­ity of so-called “incomplete” scans. Musée Rodin’s pref­er­en­tial treat­ment of Tate London also re­vealed that it well un­der­stands there is no le­gal re­quire­ment to ap­pend marks of “Reproduction” to 3D scans of Rodin’s works.

Evaluating our ev­i­dence and the mu­se­um’s strange claims, the court de­ter­mined that musée Rodin can­not evade its oblig­a­tion to com­mu­ni­cate 3D scans by claim­ing they ex­clude por­tions of the scanned sub­jects or are of low qual­ity, nor by ad­mit­ting its tech­no­log­i­cal in­com­pe­tence to use them.

The court viewed musée Rodin’s trade­marks in the “Rodin” name to be ir­rel­e­vant, de­spite the mu­se­um’s re­peated plead­ings. This de­ci­sion will help pre­vent other or­ga­ni­za­tions from block­ing pub­lic ac­cess to art­work by at­tach­ing their trade­marks to dig­i­tal records and phys­i­cal repli­cas of pub­lic do­main works.

Musée Rodin had orig­i­nally as­sured the CADA that it would com­ply with my re­quest for the mu­se­um’s in­ter­nal cor­re­spon­dence dis­cussing my first re­quests to the mu­seum. Once in trial, though, the mu­seum re­versed its po­si­tion and at­tempted to con­ceal these doc­u­ments from me with an im­proper, retroac­tive claim of at­tor­ney-client priv­i­lege which the judges re­jected. The court or­dered musée Rodin to com­mu­ni­cate to me its early, in­ter­nal de­lib­er­a­tions on my ini­tial in­quiries.

Before I filed my suit, in cor­re­spon­dence be­tween musée Rodin and the Ministry of Culture — which the mu­seum ac­ci­den­tally re­vealed dur­ing trial — the mu­se­um’s then-di­rec­tor asked the Ministry for ad­vice on how the mu­seum should re­spond to my re­quests and de­fend its re­fusals. The Ministry de­clined to give the mu­seum any guid­ance, not­ing the Ministry’s own need for the clar­i­fi­ca­tions from the court that would re­sult from my likely lit­i­ga­tion. Despite this, and even though musée Rodin re­luc­tantly made sev­eral con­ces­sions to me only in the course of the trial and ac­knowl­edged it was do­ing so as a di­rect re­sult of my suit, the mu­seum nonethe­less pe­ti­tioned the court to con­demn me to pay for its le­gal de­fense, and re­quested a fig­ure more than ten times what is typ­i­cal in this kind of pro­ce­dure. This ma­neu­ver was clearly in­tended to pe­nal­ize and in­tim­i­date me and dis­cour­age fu­ture re­questers from stand­ing up for the pub­lic’s rights.

Not only did the court re­ject that abu­sive re­quest, the judges con­demned musée Rodin to pay me € 1,500 to­wards the ex­penses I in­curred in bring­ing this ac­tion against the mu­seum. Even though this a very small, sym­bolic sum com­pared to the time and ef­fort my at­tor­ney and I have de­voted to this ef­fort, we are happy to have this recog­ni­tion from the court of the le­git­i­macy and need for our ef­forts.

As of this writ­ing, more than a year past the court’s dead­line to com­mu­ni­cate its scans and re­lated doc­u­ments to the pub­lic, musée Rodin has still not com­plied; it has not pub­lished nor sent me a sin­gle doc­u­ment, nor has it paid me the to­ken com­pen­sa­tion. The mu­seum has ap­par­ently de­cided to com­pound its law­less­ness by de­fy­ing the court’s or­ders, likely with the in­tent to ex­haust our very lim­ited re­sources by forc­ing us to bring it back to the tri­bunal to get an­other or­der forc­ing it to ac­tu­ally com­ply with the rul­ing.

Nevertheless, al­to­gether the court’s de­ci­sion amounts to a com­plete re­pu­di­a­tion of all ar­gu­ments against pub­lic ac­cess that re­lied on the mu­se­um’s droit moral, eco­nomic model, cul­tural and pat­ri­mony sen­si­tiv­i­ties, in­sti­tu­tional pres­tige and ro­man­tic mys­tique. We ac­com­plished this de­spite the mu­se­um’s false alarms of an ex­is­ten­tial threat to all French na­tional mu­se­ums, and we did this with a for­eign plain­tiff (me), whom musée Rodin por­trayed as a di­rect com­mer­cial com­peti­tor, and whom it re­peat­edly in­sin­u­ated had crim­i­nal in­tent, a no­tion we did not even credit with a de­nial. Our en­tire ap­proach and fram­ing of the case, and the re­sult­ing de­ci­sion, clear away the gov­ern­men­t’s strongest, most sen­sa­tional — and most lu­di­crous — ob­jec­tions to pub­lic ac­cess to dig­i­ti­za­tions of pub­lic do­main art­work.

We have es­tab­lished the strongest le­gal foun­da­tion for pub­lic ac­cess and reuse of dig­i­ti­za­tions of pub­lic do­main works ever, in the most chal­leng­ing pos­si­ble cir­cum­stances, against an ex­tremely well-po­si­tioned ad­ver­sary. This rul­ing is a sig­nif­i­cant ac­com­plish­ment that will help with every other fight for pub­lic ac­cess to cul­tural her­itage works in France and be­yond.

Along with the im­por­tant prece­dents de­scribed above, how­ever, the tri­bunal made sev­eral se­ri­ous le­gal and pro­ce­dural er­rors that Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh and I feel ob­lig­ated to cor­rect. If those er­rors stand, they would weaken the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments in gen­eral, and specif­i­cally per­mit the gov­ern­ment to con­ceal an ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily im­por­tant class of doc­u­ments. The tri­bunal’s er­rors pose a dan­ger to the pub­lic well be­yond the ques­tion of ac­cess­ing sim­ple 3D scans from mu­seum col­lec­tions.

From the very start, I had re­quested that musée Rodin com­mu­ni­cate to me a list of the 3D scan files in its pos­ses­sion, in­clud­ing scans of works from other or­ga­ni­za­tions’ col­lec­tions. The CADA’s analy­sis af­firmed my re­quest, not­ing that the law re­quires the mu­seum to com­mu­ni­cate such a list to the pub­lic even if one does not ex­ist and must be gen­er­ated on de­mand. In re­sponse, the mu­seum not only de­nied that it held scans from other or­ga­ni­za­tions, but it flatly told the CADA — in writ­ing but with­out any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion — that it sim­ply would not give me a list of any scan files it held. In court it never of­fered any de­fense of this law­less po­si­tion.

Instead, dur­ing trial musée Rodin pro­vided two in­com­plete, im­pre­cise, and con­tra­dic­tory in­ven­to­ries, not of files, but of the few sculp­tures it ad­mits hav­ing scanned and par­tial, vague de­scrip­tions of their file for­mats. At the same time, the mu­seum com­plained to the court that our re­quest for doc­u­ments lacked suf­fi­cient pre­ci­sion since we could not guess at the ex­act files it held.

We re­peat­edly urged the court to rec­og­nize that the mu­seum had in fact never sup­plied a sim­ple list of files and had never iden­ti­fied even a sin­gle scan file by its ac­tual file name.

The court nonethe­less ruled that my re­quest for a list of files had been ren­dered moot be­cause the mu­seum had pro­vided one dur­ing the trial, which, again, it quite sim­ply never did.

To this day, the court it­self has no idea what scan files the mu­seum pos­sesses nor what, specif­i­cally, it has or­dered the mu­seum to pub­lish, and the pub­lic can only guess. It is a very strange sit­u­a­tion.

In its first de­fense brief, musée Rodin con­firmed that it held 3D scans of sev­eral sculp­tures, in­clud­ing The Kiss, Sleep, and The Three Shades. It specif­i­cally told the court it would pub­lish these three scans in or­der to neu­tral­ize el­e­ments of my suit. While it even­tu­ally, im­prop­erly, pub­lished edited ver­sions of The Kiss and Sleep, it pub­lished noth­ing for The Three Shades.

We not only alerted the court to musée Rodin’s fail­ure to pub­lish the The Three Shades scan, but we were also able to lo­cate and pre­sent the court with pho­to­graphic ev­i­dence that the mu­seum had in­deed scanned the sculp­ture.

The mu­seum re­sponded in its sec­ond de­fense brief by re­luc­tantly elab­o­rat­ing that in 2008 it had co­op­er­ated with sev­eral or­ga­ni­za­tions to 3D scan a plas­ter cast of The Three Shades that be­longs to the National Foundation for Contemporary Art (FNAC) and has been de­posited in the musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper since 1914, be­fore Auguste Rodin died and be­fore musée Rodin was even es­tab­lished. Musée Rodin ex­plained to the court that it had mis­tak­enly promised to pub­lish a scan of The Three Shades only to re­al­ize later that it did not have a scan of its own cast of the sculp­ture. Obviously wor­ried that it had ac­ci­den­tally con­firmed that it holds scans from other or­ga­ni­za­tions’ col­lec­tions af­ter specif­i­cally deny­ing this, the mu­seum fur­ther ex­plained… noth­ing.

Musée Rodin never sug­gested there had been any tech­ni­cal prob­lems when it scanned FNAC’s Three Shades. It never sug­gested it could not lo­cate the scan. It never claimed the scan did not ex­ist, and it never de­nied pos­sess­ing it. The Three Shades sim­ply dis­ap­peared from musée Rodin’s de­fense ar­gu­ments, and for some rea­son the court took it upon it­self to imag­ine an ex­pla­na­tion for its van­ish­ing.

Incredibly, in its writ­ten de­ci­sion, the tri­bunal ruled that my re­quest for the scan of The Three Shades was moot be­cause, in the judges’ own words, “musée Rodin ul­ti­mately main­tains that its re­search shows that it did not pro­ceed with the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of The Three Shades due to tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties. Under these con­di­tions, no files can be com­mu­ni­cated.”

It’s fit­ting that The Three Shades stands atop the Gates of Hell. The court’s mis­han­dling of a sim­ple list of files and The Three Shades to­gether would damn the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments to a hope­less fate. If on one hand the court may credit an ad­min­is­tra­tive agency with iden­ti­fy­ing files it never iden­ti­fied, while on the other hand er­ro­neously con­clude that other files never ex­isted — with­out the agency even mak­ing that claim and de­spite the agen­cy’s own state­ments and in­de­pen­dent proof to the con­trary — the gov­ern­ment could con­ceal any doc­u­ments it pleased sim­ply by be­ing strate­gi­cally sloppy with its state­ments to the court, ren­der­ing free­dom of in­for­ma­tion law com­pletely dys­func­tional.

The po­ten­tial for harm from these er­rors is dif­fi­cult to over­state, since it is mul­ti­plied by the court’s fur­ther con­fu­sion over a sim­ple type of doc­u­ment com­monly used to record and pre­serve 3D mea­sure­ments: point-clouds. At a min­i­mum, the doc­u­ments and data at risk re­late to the en­tirety of the French na­tional ter­ri­tory.

As we care­fully ex­plained to the tri­bunal, when a sub­ject is 3D scanned the scan­ning equip­ment takes mea­sure­ments of many mil­lions — some­times bil­lions — of points on the sub­jec­t’s sur­face. A doc­u­ment known as a point-cloud is saved, which records the X, Y, and Z po­si­tions of each mea­sured point rel­a­tive to the scan­ner. Sometimes they also record each point’s color data and other prop­er­ties. Point-cloud doc­u­ments are the pri­mary, fun­da­men­tal metro­log­i­cal records that archive the re­sults of 3D scan sur­veys. They are the es­sen­tial doc­u­ments from which all analy­ses and un­der­stand­ing flow and are typ­i­cally among the most im­por­tant de­liv­er­ables scan­ning ser­vice providers pro­duce for their clients, be they pri­vate or pub­lic.

Because they are so im­por­tant, point-clouds are fre­quently saved in plain­text for­mats like .ASCII, .OBJ, and .TXT to en­sure that they re­main open source, eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble, and well-pre­served for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. Anyone can open a plain­text for­mat­ted point-cloud doc­u­ment in text edit­ing soft­ware and view the nu­meric val­ues it records. Point-cloud doc­u­ments are of course di­rectly ex­ploitable with 3D soft­ware and sim­ple web-browser vi­su­al­iza­tion tools which can eas­ily and im­me­di­ately read them and dis­play vi­su­al­iza­tions, 3D dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ments and re­con­struc­tions, and pre­cise analy­ses of the scanned sub­ject. The Ministry of Culture it­self rec­om­mends pre­serv­ing and pub­lish­ing scan data in open text for­mat point-clouds for these very rea­sons, and this is also why musée Rodin orig­i­nally agreed to cre­ate and pub­lish text-for­mat­ted point-clouds in its dig­i­ti­za­tion fund­ing ap­pli­ca­tions to the min­istry so many years ago.

So what is re­ally at risk here?

Our case deals with scans of sculp­tures held by musée Rodin — per­haps a few dozen, per­haps hun­dreds; the num­ber is un­clear — but the lower court did not seem to re­al­ize that 3D scan­ning is­n’t lim­ited to sculp­ture or the cul­tural her­itage sec­tor, of course. Point-cloud doc­u­ments are used to record and pre­serve in­for­ma­tion about al­most every type of sub­ject worth scan­ning, across count­less im­por­tant sec­tors of in­tense pub­lic in­ter­est.

France’s National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information (IGN), for ex­am­ple, is un­der­tak­ing an am­bi­tious aer­ial 3D scan­ning sur­vey of “the en­tire soil and sub­soil of France.” Forests, farm­land, coast­lines, roads, civil in­fra­struc­ture and en­tire cities — the en­tire built and nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment — are be­ing 3D scanned and recorded in point-cloud doc­u­ments.

According to IGN, tril­lions of points of 3D data are be­ing gath­ered “to re­spond to ma­jor so­ci­etal chal­lenges” and all the data be­ing ac­quired and pro­duced within the frame­work of the pro­gram is be­ing dis­trib­uted un­der open data li­censes. IGN’s point-cloud doc­u­ments are in­tended to be used in en­vi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing, risk man­age­ment, forestry and agri­cul­ture, bio­di­ver­sity mon­i­tor­ing, mu­nic­i­pal and in­fra­struc­ture plan­ning, ar­chae­ol­ogy, and what­ever else the pub­lic wishes to do with them, in­clud­ing uses we have not yet in­vented.

Point-cloud doc­u­ments are also used in spe­cific cases we can­not an­tic­i­pate, in­clud­ing as­sess­ing dis­as­ter sites, crime scenes, and in­dus­trial ac­ci­dents. For ex­am­ple, point-clouds of Notre Dame de Paris re­sult­ing from 3D sur­veys made prior to the 2019 fire are now es­sen­tial to its cur­rent restora­tion.

In our case, the ad­min­is­tra­tive tri­bunal of Paris ap­pears to have dis­re­garded these in­con­tro­vert­ible facts and our ex­perts’ ad­vi­sories on the role, use­ful­ness, uni­ver­sal ac­ces­si­bil­ity, di­rect ex­ploitabil­ity, and im­por­tance of point-cloud doc­u­ments. It also ig­nored our re­quest that it un­der­take an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of its own to bet­ter in­form it­self and un­der­stand the tech­nol­ogy and is­sues at stake.

Instead, the court ap­pears to have al­lowed it­self to be con­fused by the un­sub­stan­ti­ated and con­tra­dic­tory state­ments of musée Rodin’s anony­mous and con­fessed in­com­pe­tent tech­ni­cal con­sul­tants.

The court ar­tic­u­lated its pro­found mis­un­der­stand­ing of the tech­nol­ogy and na­ture of point-cloud doc­u­ments by ex­plain­ing that they may be with­held from the pub­lic be­cause they are not di­rectly use­ful in them­selves, “but only con­sti­tute raw ma­te­r­ial needed for the pro­duc­tion of sub­se­quent doc­u­ments.”

The court not only de­ferred to the mu­se­um’s mis­lead­ing tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, it did some­thing far more strange and omi­nous. On its own ini­tia­tive the tri­bunal ruled that since it con­tains unedited raw data, a doc­u­ment con­tain­ing a point-cloud — an en­tire class of doc­u­ments — may be with­held from the pub­lic be­cause, as the court ex­plained, it “does not re­veal any in­ten­tion on the part of the ad­min­is­tra­tion”.

Worse, dur­ing trial, musée Rodin it­self did not even sug­gest ei­ther of these strange tech­ni­cal and le­gal ar­gu­ments, which only ap­peared for the first time in the judges’ own fi­nal writ­ten de­ci­sion. My at­tor­ney and I were never af­forded an op­por­tu­nity to point out to the court that its rea­son­ing had no ba­sis in the law, which holds that an ad­min­is­tra­tion’s “intentions” are ir­rel­e­vant to the com­mu­ni­ca­bil­ity of its doc­u­ments. Nor could we gen­tly re­mind the court that its fac­tual as­ser­tions were un­true and wildly at odds with 3D scan­ning and 3D data han­dling prac­tices and con­sen­sus in the cul­tural her­itage field, in in­dus­try, by am­a­teurs, and with the gov­ern­men­t’s own rec­om­men­da­tions for 3D data preser­va­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion.

The tri­bunal’s le­gal and tech­no­log­i­cal er­rors on the point-cloud is­sue alone pose a threat to pub­lic ac­cess to mil­lions of doc­u­ments con­tain­ing petabytes of data from gov­ern­ment-funded 3D sur­veys of the en­vi­ron­ment, oceans, the at­mos­phere, forests, flood­plains, farm­land, ar­chi­tec­ture, towns and cities, civil in­fra­struc­ture, and ar­chae­o­log­i­cal sites, as well as the pri­mary, archival, high­est-res­o­lu­tion 3D scans of cul­tural her­itage works.

Under the tri­bunal’s rul­ing, pub­licly funded point-cloud doc­u­ments such as those be­ing pro­duced by IGN and oth­ers could legally be with­held en­tirely from the pub­lic. Or, the gov­ern­ment could elect, at its own dis­cre­tion, to grant the pub­lic ac­cess to such doc­u­ments only af­ter they had been processed, re­fined, or edited to ac­com­mo­date pri­vate con­trac­tors’ and spe­cial in­ter­ests’ com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tions, or per­haps po­lit­i­cal sen­si­tiv­i­ties, with no le­gal re­course for the pub­lic to ex­am­ine the orig­i­nal, un­al­tered point-cloud doc­u­ments di­rectly.

Concerning point-clouds alone, the court’s er­rors im­me­di­ately threaten to stall im­por­tant tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments, hin­der sci­en­tific re­search and open­ness, and ob­scure and im­pede in­fra­struc­ture and en­vi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing by sci­en­tists, the pub­lic, jour­nal­ists, and the gen­eral pub­lic.

I can only imag­ine and hope that the tri­bunal was sim­ply un­aware of the scope and de­gree of dam­age these highly ir­reg­u­lar el­e­ments of its de­ci­sion would cause. They are dan­ger­ous.

France’s supreme court for­mally ac­cepted our ap­peal on April 17, 2024 and trans­mit­ted our brief to musée Rodin and the Ministry of Culture. You can read our brief here. The court gave the min­istry and mu­seum two months to pre­sent their de­fense, a dead­line they have, as of this writ­ing, missed by over three months. It is un­likely they will pub­li­cize their de­fense nor so­licit in­put from the pub­lic while draft­ing it.

Our brief ex­plains point-by-point the Paris tri­bunal’s grave le­gal and pro­ce­dural er­rors and un­am­bigu­ously demon­strates the lower court’s ob­vi­ous and pro­found tech­no­log­i­cal mis­un­der­stand­ing of point-cloud doc­u­ments.

So much more is now at stake than pub­lic ac­cess to 3D scans of a few pop­u­lar sculp­tures, or pre­serv­ing the 19th-century busi­ness model of one in­tran­si­gent mu­seum. One mu­seum could have law­less and re­ac­tionary ad­min­is­tra­tors op­posed to pub­lic over­sight and pub­lic ac­cess, with no vi­sion or plan­ning for the fu­ture or in­no­va­tion in the arts, and the dam­age might be rea­son­ably con­tained to the loss of scans of its own col­lec­tion. But with its de­cep­tive ar­gu­ments, reck­less tac­tics, and the ap­proval of the Ministry of Culture, musée Rodin man­aged to dis­tract and con­fuse the tri­bunal with dan­ger­ous im­pli­ca­tions on a much larger scale.

The pub­lic and the Conseil d’É­tat need to un­der­stand that the tri­bunal’s rea­son­ing would fun­da­men­tally un­der­mine the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments and hin­der its abil­ity to mon­i­tor the gov­ern­men­t’s ac­tiv­i­ties in count­less sec­tors. The lower court’s er­rors would sub­ject the pub­lic’s right to ac­cess ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments to the ar­bi­trary whims of ad­min­is­tra­tions that could sim­ply hide, ob­fus­cate, or mis­rep­re­sent their hold­ings and their “intentions” for doc­u­ments as a means of block­ing pub­lic in­quiry. The tri­bunal’s de­ci­sion would also set a prece­dent al­low­ing re­gional courts to sim­ply in­vent their own le­gal stan­dards on a case-by-case ba­sis, based on to­tal un­fa­mil­iar­ity with both well-es­tab­lished and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, with­out giv­ing lit­i­gants or the pub­lic a chance to re­spond.

All this pub­lic dam­age be­cause musée Rodin wants to op­er­ate like a pri­vate ate­lier with a mo­nop­oly to ex­clu­sively ser­vice one long-dead artist’s es­tate and his wealthy col­lec­tors, for­ever. Rather than em­brace the fu­ture and per­mit the pub­lic to ac­cess their 3D dig­i­ti­za­tions of the pub­lic’s cul­tural her­itage, musée Rodin and the Ministry of Culture have cre­ated a smoke­screen of le­gal and tech­no­log­i­cal non­sense and started a fire that threat­ens our com­mon re­sources across the en­tire dig­i­tal land­scape.

The pro­duc­tive, law­ful el­e­ments of the Paris tri­bunal’s de­ci­sion will be es­sen­tial to se­cur­ing ac­cess to count­less im­por­tant 3D scans from French na­tional mu­se­ums. The de­ci­sion will help oth­ers’ ef­forts to mod­ern­ize poli­cies and es­tab­lish pub­lic ac­cess to dig­i­ti­za­tions in pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions through­out Europe. We can all look for­ward to what the pub­lic will cre­ate by fully ex­er­cis­ing our newly clar­i­fied rights, and we will all be en­riched by the full use of 3D scans of our shared cul­tural her­itage.

But first the Conseil d’É­tat must ex­tin­guish the fire musée Rodin and the Ministry of Culture have started.

Cosmo Wenman is an open ac­cess ac­tivist and a de­sign and fab­ri­ca­tion con­sul­tant. He lives in San Diego. He can be reached at cos­mowen­man.com and twit­ter.com/​Cos­moWen­man

If you en­joyed this story, please share it and sub­scribe. I’ll be writ­ing more about this case as it pro­gresses.

Hélène Pilidjian

Head of the lit­i­ga­tion of­fice,

Ministry of Culture

he­lene.pilid­jian@cul­ture.gouv.fr

+33 (0)1 40 15 80 00

Decision of the Administrative Tribunal of Paris, April 21 2023:

https://​cos­mowen­man.files.word­press.com/​2024/​03/​20230421-cosmo-wen­man-vs-musee-rodin-de­ci­sion-ad­min­is­tra­tive-tri­bunal-of-paris_fr_en.pdf

Web browsers are ubiq­ui­tous, but how do they work? This book ex­plains, build­ing a ba­sic but com­plete web browser, from net­work­ing to JavaScript, in a cou­ple thou­sand lines of Python.

Web Browser Engineering will be pub­lished by Oxford University Press be­fore the end of the year. To get it as soon as it’s out, pre-or­der

now!

Follow this book’s blog or Twitter for up­dates. You can also talk about the book with oth­ers in our dis­cus­sion

fo­rum.

If you are en­joy­ing the book, con­sider sup­port­ing us on Patreon.

Or just send us an

email!

This site is home to the doc­u­men­ta­tion for the SQLite pro­jec­t’s WebAssembly- and JavaScript-related APIs, which en­able the use of

sqlite3 in mod­ern WASM-capable browsers.

Cookie/storage dis­claimer: this site re­quires a mod­ern, JavaScript-capable browser for full func­tion­al­ity. This site uses client-side stor­age for per­sist­ing cer­tain brows­ing pref­er­ences (like the bright/​dark mode tog­gle) but its server does not process, nor trans­fer to any other en­tity, any user-level in­for­ma­tion be­yond cer­tain SCM-side dis­play-re­lated pref­er­ences and the cre­den­tials of logged-in de­vel­op­ers.

Making use of this pro­ject:

Third-party pro­jects known to be us­ing this pro­ject in­clude (in or­der of their ad­di­tion to this list)…

* Evolu Evolu is a lo­cal-first plat­form

de­signed for pri­vacy, ease of use, and no ven­dor lock-in.

* SQLiteNext pro­vides a demo of

in­te­grat­ing this pro­ject with next.js.

* sqlite-wasm-esm demon­strates

how to use this pro­ject with the Vite tool­chain.

* sqlite-wasm-http

pro­vides an SQLite VFS with read-only ac­cess to data­bases which are

served di­rectly over HTTP.

The fol­low­ing links ref­er­ence ar­ti­cles and doc­u­men­ta­tion pub­lished about SQLite WASM by third par­ties:

<center>

<img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​213b6618-e133-4b6b-a74a-267de68606aa.png” style=“width: 140px”>

# Big changes are com­ing to ArchiveBox!

*New fea­tures com­ing to the fu­ture of self-host­ing in­ter­net archives: a full plu­gin ecosys­tem, P2P shar­ing be­tween in­stances, Cloudflare/CAPTCHA solv­ing, auto-lo­gins, and more…*.

</center>

<hr/>

In the wake of the [recent at­tack](https://​www.thev­erge.com/​2024/​10/​9/​24266419/​in­ter­net-archive-ddos-at­tack-pop-up-mes­sage) against Archive.org, [ArchiveBox](https://​archive­box.io) has been get­ting some in­creased at­ten­tion from peo­ple won­der­ing how to **self-host their own in­ter­net archives**.


ArchiveBox is a strong sup­porter of Archive.org and their mis­sion to pre­serve all of hu­man knowl­edge. We’ve been do­nat­ing for years, and we urge you to do the same, they pro­vide an in­valu­able ser­vice for all of hu­man­ity.

We com­pletely con­demn the DDoS and de­face­ment of their site, and hope it never hap­pens again. Realistically though, they are an at­trac­tive tar­get for peo­ple who want to su­press in­for­ma­tion or [start IP law­suits](https://​blog.archive.org/​2024/​07/​01/​what-hap­pened-last-fri­day-in-ha­chette-v-in­ter­net-archive/), and this may not be the last time this hap­pens…

<br/>


<br/>

> We en­vi­sion a fu­ture where the world has both a ro­bust cen­tral­ized archive through Archive.org, and a wide­spread net­work of de­cen­tral­ized ArchiveBox.io in­stances.

<center>

<a href=“https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box”><img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​bac22f63-0fc9-4634-8fb8-67d29806e49c.png” style=“max-width: 380px; bor­der: 4px #915656 solid; bor­der-ra­dius: 15px; box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.09)“/&​gt;</​a>

</center>

<br/>


<br/>

### The Limits of Public Archives

In an era where fear of pub­lic scrutiny is very tan­gi­ble, peo­ple are afraid of archiv­ing things for eter­nity. As a re­sult, peo­ple choose not to archive at all, ef­fec­tively eras­ing that his­tory for­ever.

We think peo­ple should have the power to archive what *matters to them*, on an in­di­vid­ual ba­sis. We also think peo­ple should be able to *share* these archives with only the peo­ple they want.

The mod­ern web is a dif­fer­ent beast than it was in the 90′s and peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­ily want every­thing to be pub­lic any­more. Internet archiv­ing tool­ing should keep up with the times and pro­vide so­lu­tions to archive pri­vate and semi-pri­vate con­tent in this chang­ing land­scape.

#### Who cares about sav­ing stuff?

All of us have con­tent that we care about, that we want to see pre­served, but pri­vately:

- fam­i­lies might want to pre­serve their photo al­bums off Facebook, Flickr, Instagram

- in­di­vid­u­als might want to save their book­marks, so­cial feeds, or chats from Signal/Discord

- com­pa­nies might want to save their in­ter­nal doc­u­ments, old sites, com­peti­tor analy­ses, etc.

<sub>*Archiving pri­vate con­tent like this [has some in­her­ent se­cu­rity chal­lenges](https://​news.ycombi­na­tor.com/​item?id=41861455), and should be done with care.<br/&​gt;(e.g. how do you pre­vent the cook­ies used to ac­cess the con­tent from be­ing leaked in the archive snap­shots?)*</​sub>

#### What if the con­tent is evil?

There is also con­tent that un­fairly ben­e­fits from the ex­is­tence of free pub­lic archives like Archive.org, be­cause they act as a mir­ror/​am­pli­fier when orig­i­nal sites get taken down.

There is value in pre­serv­ing racism, vi­o­lence, and hate speech for lit­i­ga­tion and his­tor­i­cal record, but is there a way we can do it with­out ef­fec­tively pro­vid­ing free *public* host­ing for it?


<br/>

<center>

## ✨ Introducing ArchiveBox’s New Plugin Ecosystem ✨

</center>

<br/>

[ArchiveBox v0.8](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​re­leases) is shap­ing up to be the [**biggest re­lease in the pro­jec­t’s his­tory**](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​pull/​1311). We’ve com­pletely re-ar­chi­tected the in­ter­nals for speed and per­for­mance, and we’ve opened up ac­cess to al­low for a new plu­gin ecosys­tem to pro­vide com­mu­nity-sup­ported fea­tures.


We want to fol­low in the foot­steps of great pro­jects like [NextCloud](https://​apps.nextcloud.com/) and [Home Assistant](https://​www.home-as­sis­tant.io/​ad­dons/), and pro­vide a ro­bust “app store” for func­tion­al­ity around book­mark man­age­ment, web scrap­ing, cap­ture, and shar­ing.

#### 🧩 Here’s just a taste of some of the first plu­g­ins that will be pro­vided:

- `yt-dlp` for video, au­dio, sub­ti­tles, from Youtube, Soundcloud, YouKu, and more…

- `papers-dl` for au­to­matic down­load of sci­en­tific pa­per PDFs when DOI num­bers are seen

- `gallery-dl` to down­load photo gal­leries from Flickr, Instagram, and more

- `forum-dl` for down­load of older fo­rums and deeply nested com­ment threads

- `readability` for ar­ti­cle text ex­trac­tion to .txt, .md, .epub

- **`ai`** to send page screen­shot + text w/ a cus­tom prompt to an LLM + save the re­sponse

- **`webhooks`** trig­ger any ex­ter­nal API, ping Slack, N8N, etc. when­ever some re­sults are saved

- and [many more…](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​tree/​dev/​archive­box/​plu­g­in­s_ex­trac­tor)

If you’re cu­ri­ous, the plu­gin sys­tem is based on the ex­cel­lent, well-es­tab­lished li­braries [pluggy](https://​pluggy.readthe­docs.io/​en/​sta­ble/​in­dex.html) and [pydantic](https://​py­dan­tic-docs.help­man­ual.io/). It was a fun chal­lenge to de­velop a plu­gin sys­tem with­out over-en­gi­neer­ing it, and it took a few it­er­a­tions to get right!

> I’m ex­cited for the fu­ture this will bring! It will al­low us to keep the **core** lean and high-qual­ity while get­ting com­mu­nity help sup­port­ing a **wide pe­riph­ery** of plu­g­ins.

<br/>

#### ✨ Other things in the works:

- There is an all-new [`REST API`](https://​demo.archive­box.io/​api) built with `django-ninja`, al­ready [available in BETA](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​re­leases)

- [Support for ex­ter­nal stor­age](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​wiki/​Set­ting-Up-Stor­age) (AWS/B2/GCP/Google Drive/etc.) (via `rclone`) was added

- We’ve started adding the be­gin­nings of a con­tent-ad­dress­able store sys­tem with unique “ABID”s (identifiers based on URL + time­stamp) that can be shared be­tween in­stances. This will help us build BitTorrent/IPFS-backed P2P shar­ing be­tween in­stances in the fu­ture.

- We’ve added a back­ground job sys­tem us­ing [`huey`](https://​huey.readthe­docs.io/)

- new auto-in­stall sys­tem `archivebox in­stall` (no more com­plex `apt` de­pen­den­cies)

*(plugin’s cross-plat­form run­time de­pen­den­cies are very hard to pack­age and main­tain, check out our new [`pydantic-pkgr`](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​py­dan­tic-pkgr) li­brary that solves this and use it in your pro­jects!)*

> ArchiveBox is de­signed to be lo­cal-first with [**SQLite**](https://​www.sqlite.org/​fa­mous.html), P2P will al­ways be op­tional.

<br/>

#### 🔢 For the min­i­mal­ists who just want some­thing sim­ple:

If you’re an ex­ist­ing ArchiveBox user and feel like this is more than you need, don’t worry, we’re also re­leas­ing a new tool called [`abx-dl`](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​abx-dl) that will work like like `yt-dlp` or `gallery-dl`.

It will pro­vide a one-shot CLI to quickly down­load *all* the con­tent on any URL you pro­vide it with­out hav­ing to worry about com­plex con­fig­u­ra­tion, plu­g­ins, set­ting up a col­lec­tion, etc.

<br/>

<br/>

### 🚀 Try out the new BETA now!

```bash

pip in­stall archive­box==0.8.5r­c44

archive­box in­stall

# or

docker pull archive­box/​archive­box:dev

📖 *Read the re­lease notes for the new BETAs on our [Releases](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​Archive­Box/​re­leases) page on Github.*

💬 *[Join the dis­cus­sion on HN](https://​news.ycombi­na­tor.com/​item?id=41860909) or over on our [Zulip fo­rum](https://​zulip.archive­box.io/).*

💁‍♂️ *Or [hire us](https://​github.com/​Archive­Box/​archive­box#-pro­fes­sional-in­te­gra­tion) to pro­vide dig­i­tal preser­va­tion for your org (we pro­vide CAPTCHA/Cloudflare by­pass, popup/​ad hid­ing, on-prem/​cloud, SAML/SSO in­te­gra­tion, au­dit log­ging, and more).*

<br/><br/>

<img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​a790d511-db5c-49ae-a3d9-db41e4100f20.png” style=“width: 19.9%“/><img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​4233a584-3903-4610-9016-06d1b59ac682.png” style=“width: 19.9%“/><img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​63a73bfc-f028-40c4-885c-ad011c7e191a.png” style=“width: 19.9%“/><img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​e621d80f-87d4-4ade-8fb9-9e0e6ab42a7f.png” style=“width: 19.9%“/><img src=“https://​docs.monad­i­cal.com/​up­loads/​26285bd6-f240-41e3-99b7-70d50463e3b7.png” style=“width: 19.9%“/>

<center>

[Donate to ArchiveBox](https://​hcb.hack­club.com/​do­na­tions/​start/​archive­box) <sup>(tax-deductible!)</sup> to sup­port our open-source de­vel­op­ment.<br/&​gt;<br/&​gt;Re­mem­ber to also do­nate to [Archive.org](https://​help.archive.org/​help/​how-do-i-do­nate-to-the-in­ter­net-archive/) <sup>(not af­fil­i­ated)</​sup> to help them with the at­tack!

</center>

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What you’re see­ing be­low is two of Crokinole’s greats si­mul­ta­ne­ously se­cur­ing per­fect rounds. Technically speak­ing, they each flicked a 3.2cm disc 30cm across a board into a 3.5cm hole (just 9% wider than the disc it­self) eight times in a row. In game terms, they made eight open 20s each. But it’s just flick­ing a lit­tle disc across a small board. How hard can it be, re­ally? The mes­mer­iz­ing 56 sec­onds above were cap­tured at the semi­fi­nals of the 2024 World Crokinole Championship, where Connor Reinman de­feated Justin Slater. A matchup not un­like Magic vs. Bird, or Swift vs. Eilish. How rare was this feat of per­fec­tion? Was this one of those ob­scure new Olympic events? You may even be won­der­ing, wtf is Crokinole? We’ll get to all these ques­tions. But first, you must un­der­stand Crokinole. The game’s ori­gin: the south­ern re­gion of Ontario. If you are from the south­ern re­gion of the Canadian province of Ontario, you may al­ready be well-versed in Crokinole due to its Canadian ori­gin. For the unini­ti­ated, Crokinole is like a mashup of shuf­fle­board and curl­ing, played on a table­top board. It’s been around since the 19th cen­tury but has seen a steady rise in global pop­u­lar­ity in re­cent years. To know the game, one must play the game.

Let your train­ing be­gin. The main ob­jec­tive is to flick your discs into higher-scor­ing re­gions. The cen­ter hole is worth 20 points. Be care­ful, though—eight pegs sur­round the fif­teen-point re­gion. Here, your op­po­nent shoots on an empty board. To be a valid shot (and stay on the board) the disc must land within the 15-point re­gion. If any op­po­nent discs are on the board, your disc must hit one to be valid and stay on the board. Give it a try: Hit your op­po­nen­t’s disc. Use the slider and but­ton be­low the board to po­si­tion your disc. Then aim, hold the shoot but­ton to find the per­fect power, and re­lease. If you shoot and it is an in­valid shot, your disc is re­moved from the board and is not scored. It’s your turn, and there are no op­po­nent discs. You just need to land in the fif­teen-point re­gion, but scor­ing a 20 is ideal. A made 20 is set aside and counted. Give it a try: Shoot your disc into the cen­ter hole to se­cure the 20 points. After all six­teen discs are played, points are tal­lied based on the re­gions and any 20s. The round win­ner is the player with the most points, and a game con­sists of mul­ti­ple rounds. Easy Keanu, that was just the ba­sics. We did­n’t even get to the one-cheek rule (yes, that cheek). For more de­tails you can watch this video or read the rules. Oh, and feel free to go play—we made a sim­u­la­tor for you to hone your skills against a bot. You are ready for the next part of the jour­ney. What does the data tell us about Connor Reinman and Justin Slater? Reinman, the back-to-back world cham­pion, and Slater, the peren­nial pow­er­house, are ar­guably the great­est play­ers right now on the world stage. Player rank­ings ac­cord­ing to Crokinole Reference. No matches from 2021-2022. But how good are they? Let’s start by look­ing at their abil­ity to make open 20s, an in­dis­pens­able skill for suc­cess. Here’s how com­pet­i­tive play­ers com­pare in open 20 suc­cess rates. Reinman and Slater are top com­peti­tors in open 20s, with suc­cess rates of 66% and 75%, com­pared to the av­er­age com­pet­i­tive play­er’s 55%. For bas­ket­ball fans: a Crokinole player mak­ing eight con­sec­u­tive 20s in live play is like an NBA player sink­ing 20 straight free throws dur­ing a game—not im­pos­si­ble, but far from com­mon. How do they com­pare to ca­sual play­ers? Observing play­ers with vary­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, suc­cess rates for in-game open 20s ranged from 20% to 50%. The odds of two op­po­nents mak­ing eight con­sec­u­tive shots can vary greatly de­pend­ing on their skill level. Here are the odds of a dou­ble per­fect round. Our the­o­ret­i­cal sce­nar­ios show how even a slight drop in skill greatly im­pacts the odds. To wit­ness this rare event, both top play­ers must hit a hot streak at the same time. These per­cent­ages re­flect in-game at­tempts, where a play­er’s rhythm is dis­rupted by var­i­ous shots. In non-com­pet­i­tive, less plamiger­ent set­tings, their skills re­ally shine—like Shawn Hagarty, who set an un­of­fi­cial record with 64 con­sec­u­tive open 20s. However, real games are far more nu­anced and com­plex. Players — or their op­po­nents — of­ten miss early on. Here’s what the data re­veals af­ter an­a­lyz­ing 300 rounds from var­i­ous matchups in last sea­son’s tour­na­ments. At Which Shot an Open 20 is First Missed in Competitive Matches Note: Based on 300 rounds from fi­nal to quar­ter­fi­nal matches in the past year. More of­ten than not, the elu­sive dou­ble per­fect round is lost right at the start. But I’ve been dis­cussing this in the con­text of the most el­e­gant form — a “pure” dou­ble per­fect round, where all 16 shots are made as open 20s. Technically, though, a miss does­n’t com­pletely rule out a per­fect round. A per­fect round can (and of­ten does) in­clude a com­bi­na­tion of open 20s and ric­o­chet 20s, where a disc bounces in off the op­po­nen­t’s. Ricochet 20s by Justin Slater and Andrew Hutchinson. Watch on YouTube. The per­fect blend of aim and power is re­quired to per­fect shots like those. Try it your­self: can you achieve the feel-good ric­o­chet 20? Going for a 20 is­n’t al­ways the best or even a vi­able op­tion. Discs on the board in­tro­duce more ex­cit­ing sce­nar­ios that add lay­ers of strat­egy. Having all your discs on your side is usu­ally a strong de­fen­sive po­si­tion, but watch­ing your op­po­nent dis­man­tle it can be de­mor­al­iz­ing. That’s ex­actly what hap­pened in this round be­tween Andrew Hutchinson and Nolan Tracey. The Slater-Reinman round was the only dou­ble per­fect in a re­view of 445 highly com­pet­i­tive rounds in the past year. One thing is cer­tain: more skilled play­ers tend to keep the board clear and make open 20s at a higher rate, in­creas­ing the chance of glimps­ing a pure dou­ble per­fect round. If there’s one take­away, it’s that Crokinole is fun and the com­mu­nity is awe­some. Whether you’re play­ing to win or just flick­ing a few rounds with Grandma dur­ing the hol­i­days, it’s a great time. So, maybe you’re into Crokinole now? Here are some re­sources to help you get started, or go get some prac­tice in with the sim­u­la­tor. Buy a board here (or here, here, here) Player types are es­ti­ma­tions based on all open 20 suc­cess rates from 2023-2024 NCA tour­na­ment data. Competitive 20 suc­cess rates are from Shawn Hagarty’s im­pres­sive data. Recreational open 20 suc­cess rates are based on ob­ser­va­tions of 600 open 20 at­tempts from 10 in­di­vid­u­als with at least 50 at­tempts each. First missed shot data is from watch­ing play­off-rounds from all 2023-2024 tour­na­ments on Tracey Boards cov­er­age of events. Yearly NCA tour rank­ings data is based on the rank in July (at the end of the sea­son). Data from Crokinole Reference. The Pudding

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