In 2017, open-access advocate Cosmo Wenman began requesting 3D scans of Auguste Rodin's sculptures from the Rodin Museum — scans produced with public funding, of works long in the public domain. The museum's response was not merely refusal but, according to court filings and disclosed internal communications, a deliberate strategy of obstruction. The museum's director privately told the Ministry of Culture she planned to ignore French freedom of information law and force Wenman to litigate. The French government's own Commission on Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) sided with Wenman, finding the scans were clearly administrative documents subject to public disclosure. The museum ignored the ruling. When suit was filed in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris in 2019 — with Communia, Wikimédia France, and La Quadrature du Net as co-plaintiffs — the museum mounted a defense built on contradictions: the scans were simultaneously too low-quality to be useful and too dangerous because counterfeiters might exploit them. It claimed a sculpture had never been scanned, then was confronted with a photograph of the scanning in progress. It asserted its funding applications for the scans did not exist, until a separate FOI proceeding forced the Ministry to disclose them. The Paris tribunal in December 2023 rejected every substantive defense the museum raised — trade secrecy, counterfeiting risk, business model harm, intellectual property — and ordered the museum to release the scans and pay €1,500 in damages. But the judges, apparently confused by the museum's technical hand-waving about point cloud data formats, carved out a novel exception: point cloud documents in open plaintext formats could be withheld. The museum and Ministry then ignored even the portions of the order they lost. On appeal to the Conseil d'État, France's highest administrative court, the plaintiffs presented expert testimony, showed that the French government itself publishes petabytes of point cloud data from aerial surveys, and cited the Ministry of Culture's own published guidance on point cloud formatting and accessibility. The court's rapporteure publique opened her presentation by invoking Magritte's 'This Is Not a Pipe' to argue that 'sometimes a document is not a document,' then stumbled when she read aloud the dictionary definition of 'document' and appeared to realize it contradicted her position. The Conseil d'État went further than the museum had dared. On its own initiative, it raised a new argument the museum never suggested: that point cloud documents were not administrative documents at all. It gave the plaintiffs no basis for this theory to rebut. The rapporteure publique recycled exceptions to FOI law that the CADA, the lower court, and even the museum's own briefs had already abandoned — and asserted it would be too 'burdensome' for the museum to deliver documents it had been sitting on for eight years. What makes this case structurally important is not just one museum's behavior but the institutional machinery that rewarded it. A public institution funded by taxpayers produced digital scans of public domain works, lied repeatedly to courts and regulators about those scans' existence and usability, ignored a direct court order, and was rescued by the nation's highest administrative court inventing new legal doctrine on its behalf. The CADA's expert opinion was disregarded. World-class expert testimony was set aside. The court's own legal analyst reached for surrealism as jurisprudence. The eight-year arc of this case is a clean illustration of how cultural institutions convert public domain heritage into private tollbooths. The scans were publicly funded. The sculptures are public domain. The data formats are open and widely used. Every legitimate legal defense was tried and rejected. What remains is raw institutional power: the court's willingness to invent doctrine rather than compel a state museum to comply with freedom of information law. The cost is borne by every researcher, educator, and member of the public who might have used those scans.
