Rendered at 03:00:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
yubblegum 24 minutes ago [-]
> Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh
Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
I have a friend in museum management and I socialize with their museum friends.
A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.
I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.
shermantanktop 15 minutes ago [-]
Some professions seem especially prone to this priesthood mindset. Inward-looking, amplified self-regard, and dedicated to a mission that nobody asked them to take on, because the new mission is more gratifying and ego-boosting.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
sinuhe69 8 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
geokon 1 hours ago [-]
I often have the experience of going to a museum, seeing a painting I like, and then not being able to find any image of it online - let alone a highres scan. In my casual searches I've found museums generally don't share high resolution scans of their collections. Try to find high resolution images of famous, but not super famous paintings. It's often virtually impossible.
I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here
atombender 4 hours ago [-]
Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
awongh 4 hours ago [-]
It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.
shiandow 4 hours ago [-]
Is the museum supposed to have such a monopoly? Because then the ruling would be disappointing but ultimately not incoherent.
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
mceachen 3 hours ago [-]
TFA discusses this in depth—and that the end ruling (according to the article) was haphazard, inconsistent, and indefensible.
egocodedinsol 23 minutes ago [-]
Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.
Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.
So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.
Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.
I ask myself that with every FOIA request. If I had a dollar for every internal email I obtained saying that the public body intended to ignore the FOIA and make me sue for access, I would certainly be able to buy a sandwich.
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
awongh 4 hours ago [-]
After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.
It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....
Onavo 4 hours ago [-]
Because they are snobby gatekeepers who think making art more accessible would dilute their value. These sorts are very common in the art and academia world.
jacobolus 39 minutes ago [-]
Or more likely because they make money from selling small replicas of the sculptures in the museum store, and don't want to undercut that by making it trivial for everyone in the world to 3d print their own.
unyttigfjelltol 4 hours ago [-]
Or because they are ignorant, scared and facing a technological disruption that might threaten the value of the original, which is the very reason the museum exists. You get a similar dynamic with over-enthusiastic corporate takedown notices.
I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.
echoangle 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s about the precedent and the government didn’t want to have to publish raw data on everything they have so they made sure to win this one?
Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…
pj_mukh 4 hours ago [-]
Oh boy.
I don’t want to freak the museum out but I have 360 degree footage of large sections of the museum (mostly for a spatial index) and now I’m wondering how high a quality I could get with splatting the sculptures and making it public.
Would I get cease desisted for hosting from across the pond? Or would they be too lazy to come after me?
MisterMunchkin 3 hours ago [-]
This case was about trying to obtain the museum’s own scans under FOI, it’s nothing to do with releasing your own scans.
I’m open to ideas but I don’t see how they could screw you if they’re your own scans. They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they can’t get you on copyright. It’s not their files, so they can’t get you on piracy.
Do it.
MattDamonSpace 2 hours ago [-]
What is a spatial index
taneq 2 hours ago [-]
By the time you get C&D’d it would be far too late.
I’d spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.
arjie 3 hours ago [-]
A very good warning to most museums that rely on reproductions and so on to not make high-quality scans of their artifacts. Once you do so, you lose a revenue stream in reproductions because anyone then will have high-quality data to produce reconstructions. If anyone has already done this, they are probably best served to immediately destroy those on some kind of archival cost pretext, retaining only the original artifacts.
The steady state of this might be that most artifacts are at risk of being lost, certainly, but this particular combination of rules certainly makes it hard for a public museum to survive. Private collections face no such risk, of course.
3eb7988a1663 1 hours ago [-]
Even without the original high quality scans, surely some talented artists could make a passable facsimile which is suitable to sell in a knick-knack gift shop.
froh 1 hours ago [-]
will this be appealed at the EU level?
DoctorOetker 4 hours ago [-]
People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.
At least the metamath verifiers will not bend over backwards and come up with absurd inconsistent counterarguments.
It's the most humiliating thing for citizens when the legal cadre of a nation pretends in the national journal that everybody falls for its lies... openly mocking the concept of truth itself with absurdism.
wahern 3 hours ago [-]
Legal systems typically use non-monotonic logic. Most formal logic systems, particularly in mathematical fields, use monotonic logic. Monotonic logic isn't well suited for the law or most other areas of human activity.
If you want an entire legal system formally defined in logic, you're going to have to do a ton of novel work in expanding the understanding of and application of non-monotonic logic because there isn't much scholarship compared to monotonic logic systems.
That said, France is one of the only countries that has tried anything like this. Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this. I think it uses monotonic logic, though, and I don't think anybody has seriously suggested the French tax code is something to be copied, neither as a tax code nor an approach to legal codification more generally.
betaby 2 hours ago [-]
> Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this.
If their taxes are defined mathematically I would not expect constant mishaps with the budget.
thyrsus 1 hours ago [-]
Budgets are based on predictions of the future, and "predictions are difficult, especially about the future".
andrewflnr 4 hours ago [-]
> But the Rodin Museum and the Ministry of Culture simply ignored the court’s order. To be clear, they did not appeal it, they ignored it.
No formulation of the law will solve this. The problem is clearly not that the law was unclear. Either the people with real power do what's right, or they don't.
DoctorOetker 3 hours ago [-]
> No formulation of the law will solve this.
It's a tall claim, given a proper formalization (say under democratic control), malicious counterparty just can't force the national formal verifier to pronounce this or that if it doesn't follow.
miohtama 3 hours ago [-]
Let me tell you about Mr Trump
DoctorOetker 3 hours ago [-]
please don't make this a partisan issue, I'm sure you can come up with ways to fool a minimalistic verifier (redundantly implemented) into agreeing with your position.
Imagine every autocrat or dictator and all agents of the state, having freedoms, would have to prove the law authorizes them to exercise this or that step, instead of dictating orders. Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law, raised to double check it by formal verification. It will point out any flaws on the path to the "desired conclusion". If properly grounded it would be hell for control freaks, they'd leave government positions at scale, the real problem solvers (some human, some machines if we cherish human rights etc more than vanity) would float up.
Does that sound it makes life easier or harder on your average boogeyman?
MadnessASAP 38 minutes ago [-]
And what happens when they say 1+1 doesn't equal 2 and ignore any objections?
krisoft 3 hours ago [-]
> People always get upset when I propose mathematical formalization of law and using e.g. metamath verifier as a judge.
I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means. What would that look like in practice?
Lets see some simple example. 18 U.S. Code § 912: “Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
How would you write that in mathematical formalization?
And then how would you make a metamath verifier judge if Robert J. Rippee committed it on
January 1, 1991? I’m sure you can google the case(United States v. Rippee, 961 F.2d 677), but a short summary: “On January 1, 1991, officers from the National City, Illinois, Police Department stopped Rippee for making an illegal U-turn. The officers let Rippee go without a ticket, however, when he told them he was a United States Marshal on his way to break up a fight at Fannies' Night Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. […] Rippee stipulated that he was not and had never been a United States Marshal.“
How would something like that look like under your proposed system?
dekhn 4 hours ago [-]
Are laws expected to be completely self and cross consistent?
I wanted programmatic law in the past and then after thinking and talking a bit, concluded that self and cross consistency in the law is not considered necessary.
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
It can't be completely self and cross consistent, it's not possible. But that is exactly the goal, we just can't achieve it.
How do you know if you are breaking the law or not if it's inconsistent? And like the sibling points out, any inconsistency can be abused to declare you guilty or innocent on any behavior depending on the partisanship and interests of the judge.
DoctorOetker 3 hours ago [-]
Obviously a formal verifier metamath, and a corresponding database like set.mm but law.mm containing all the normative statements etc would have to be supported by an ecosystem, such an ecosystem should reward finding inconsistencies, since if we tolerate just one inconsistency (which would correspond to true == false) then every statement provably true can be proven false and vice versa, this is the principle of explosion: a formal system loses every meaning when an inconsistency is present, hence an ecosystem maintaining the law would encourage finding inconsistencies instead of swiping the arbitrarianism under the rug.
shiandow 4 hours ago [-]
Formalisation can't save you from determining what is and isn't a document. The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.
DoctorOetker 3 hours ago [-]
>Formalisation can't save you from determining what is and isn't a document.
I'm not sure what this sentence even means, of course the democracy should have define those.
its up to the electorate to democratically define what is a document, to define classifications of types of documents, and which ones are administrative.
> The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.
Except the judge is plainly ignoring valid derivations, and as a verifier making silly "proofs" up (civil law, not common law) in full-frontal-nudity on behalf of one party.
The problem is not the concept of law, nor the concept of democracy, nor the concept of formalization: the problem is how do we defend against and formalize a response to corrupt verifiers in the legal system?
Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.
drysart 1 hours ago [-]
> Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.
Those who understand law know that formal verifiers cannot replace a judge, because every facet of law (the writing of it, the interpretation of it, the application of it, and the enforcement of it) has to account for all the vagueries of human existence.
No formal verifier can account for definitions that need to expand as the scope of human endeavor expands. No formal verifier can determine mens rea. No formal verifier can determine if something is obscene. No formal verifier can determine someone's mental competence. No formal verifier can cover all mitigating factors. No formal verifier can apply mercy where mercy is needed.
MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody gets upset, they just think you’re silly. Law simplification is just a classic time waste discussion. But I’ll waste 30 seconds on it for you.
Consider a simple crime, murder. Let’s simplify it to “if you kill someone, that’s murder and you get life”
But then what if I’m being stabbed by the person I kill?
Okay so self defence.
But then what if I say it’s self defence but factually that’s incorrect, but I genuinely believed it was self defence?
What if I’m a soldier and I’m shooting an enemy?
What if I shoot them because they’re raping my child?
What if I’m shooting them because they raped my child ten years ago and I’ve been plotting my revenge ever since?
What if someone said they’ll shoot me if I didn’t shoot them?
What if I was in psychosis and thought they were going to kill me?
What if I thought they were a deer and shot them by mistake while hunting?
It turns out we have all these laws in this particular way because of thousands of years of work dealing with all of these issues.
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
Other than genuine self defense, I disagree with every single “justification” you listed. So yes, in my eyes (and the eyes of many other people I expect), the law could be substantially simplified.
2muchcoffeeman 1 hours ago [-]
Did the post actually justify anything? Reads like a list of things that make simplification of laws hard.
And if you can’t sympathise with any of those cases, I hope you’re never called upon to decide anything involving other people.
nradov 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not upset, but what you're proposing is just stupid. If you think that mathematical formalization is a desirable quality then you clearly don't understand the purpose of having a legal system in the first place.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Do they actually have any sculptures that don't already have copies spread around the world in other museums? They are fighting a losing battle here.
nik282000 2 hours ago [-]
Steal, lie, cheat, do what you want as long as you do not take from other _people_. A government is not a person, a business is not a person, a museum is not a person. They should not have the power to deprive you from accessing any media which they "own" but did not create.
3 hours ago [-]
worik 4 hours ago [-]
On the face of it this is establishment forces looking after each other to hold back data they fear could have value when it should be in the (French) public domain
But, we are hearing from one side, one perspective. The museum has not had a fair expression of their side here.
Court proceedings can look unfairly bizarre when unfairly reported. I am not saying this report is definitely unfair, but it is impossible to tell
albumen 3 hours ago [-]
The museum sets out its position in the letter from the director, linked in the article. The court record also mentioned isn’t public. So it seems that if the museum has a different argument to make than in the letter, they’re not taking the opportunity to do publicly. Draw from that what you will!
qingcharles 2 hours ago [-]
This is an absolute par-for-the-course FOIA case anywhere in the world.
There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?
In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.
Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.
Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.
Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.
A frequent topic of discussion is how hard it can be to get things on display. Many people in museum related roles view their job first as protecting and preserving the displays at all costs, with presenting them to the public as an unfortunate necessity that they’re forced to do to get funding. There are some epic fights from people who don’t want the best or most valuable works to be put on display or loan because that risks damaging them.
I would have thought that high resolution copies and archives of art would be a dream come true for these people, but from what I’ve observed many of them oppose that as well. They feel it provides an inauthentic or incomplete sense of their valued works, while also diminishing their profession of preserving these items. When you view yourself as the gatekeeper for a special, irreplaceable treasure, anything that produces a facsimile of that treasure is an abomination that must be resisted.
Some software engineers do this — devoted to some abstract notion of code cleanliness or architectural purity that has no obvious relationship to delivering working software that is useful to others.
I remember in college my art history professor had a personal digital collection of high quality scans that he'd procure somehow that were impossible to find online. The data seems to be highly guarded, I'm guessing b/c it can be used to make merchandise
So my impression is that the Rodin Museum is not really the exception here
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.
So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.
Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.
https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...
Why do public employees do this? It's not their data. Why do they fight tooth and nail to avoid responding to FOIA requests for public information? If you want a government employee to do some work, file a FOIA. They'll work their little butts off day and night to do whatever it takes to not send you the requested docs.
There needs to be a formal study done of why this happens.
It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....
I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.
Sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory but it’s the first thing I could come up with…
I don’t want to freak the museum out but I have 360 degree footage of large sections of the museum (mostly for a spatial index) and now I’m wondering how high a quality I could get with splatting the sculptures and making it public.
Would I get cease desisted for hosting from across the pond? Or would they be too lazy to come after me?
I’m open to ideas but I don’t see how they could screw you if they’re your own scans. They can’t copyright stolen artifacts from other countries, so they can’t get you on copyright. It’s not their files, so they can’t get you on piracy.
Do it.
I’d spend a while thinking about it but I know what my immediate impulse would be.
The steady state of this might be that most artifacts are at risk of being lost, certainly, but this particular combination of rules certainly makes it hard for a public museum to survive. Private collections face no such risk, of course.
At least the metamath verifiers will not bend over backwards and come up with absurd inconsistent counterarguments.
It's the most humiliating thing for citizens when the legal cadre of a nation pretends in the national journal that everybody falls for its lies... openly mocking the concept of truth itself with absurdism.
If you want an entire legal system formally defined in logic, you're going to have to do a ton of novel work in expanding the understanding of and application of non-monotonic logic because there isn't much scholarship compared to monotonic logic systems.
That said, France is one of the only countries that has tried anything like this. Their tax system is required to be defined and expressed algorithmically, and they even built a programming language and compiler tool chain to do this. I think it uses monotonic logic, though, and I don't think anybody has seriously suggested the French tax code is something to be copied, neither as a tax code nor an approach to legal codification more generally.
That's a very interesting fact. Especially in the context of the recent news of the 50 billion euros deficit https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/france-budget-debt-deficit-g...
If their taxes are defined mathematically I would not expect constant mishaps with the budget.
No formulation of the law will solve this. The problem is clearly not that the law was unclear. Either the people with real power do what's right, or they don't.
It's a tall claim, given a proper formalization (say under democratic control), malicious counterparty just can't force the national formal verifier to pronounce this or that if it doesn't follow.
Imagine every autocrat or dictator and all agents of the state, having freedoms, would have to prove the law authorizes them to exercise this or that step, instead of dictating orders. Imagine everyone was raised to ignore authority figures and only execute commands that are provably in compliance with the law, raised to double check it by formal verification. It will point out any flaws on the path to the "desired conclusion". If properly grounded it would be hell for control freaks, they'd leave government positions at scale, the real problem solvers (some human, some machines if we cherish human rights etc more than vanity) would float up.
Does that sound it makes life easier or harder on your average boogeyman?
I don’t get upset. I just don’t know what that means. What would that look like in practice?
Lets see some simple example. 18 U.S. Code § 912: “Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
How would you write that in mathematical formalization?
And then how would you make a metamath verifier judge if Robert J. Rippee committed it on January 1, 1991? I’m sure you can google the case(United States v. Rippee, 961 F.2d 677), but a short summary: “On January 1, 1991, officers from the National City, Illinois, Police Department stopped Rippee for making an illegal U-turn. The officers let Rippee go without a ticket, however, when he told them he was a United States Marshal on his way to break up a fight at Fannies' Night Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. […] Rippee stipulated that he was not and had never been a United States Marshal.“
How would something like that look like under your proposed system?
I wanted programmatic law in the past and then after thinking and talking a bit, concluded that self and cross consistency in the law is not considered necessary.
How do you know if you are breaking the law or not if it's inconsistent? And like the sibling points out, any inconsistency can be abused to declare you guilty or innocent on any behavior depending on the partisanship and interests of the judge.
I'm not sure what this sentence even means, of course the democracy should have define those.
its up to the electorate to democratically define what is a document, to define classifications of types of documents, and which ones are administrative.
> The judges main task is formalising reality and lawd, the rest of the inference is typically easy.
Except the judge is plainly ignoring valid derivations, and as a verifier making silly "proofs" up (civil law, not common law) in full-frontal-nudity on behalf of one party.
The problem is not the concept of law, nor the concept of democracy, nor the concept of formalization: the problem is how do we defend against and formalize a response to corrupt verifiers in the legal system?
Those who understand technology to verify arguments already exists can only come to the conclusion we'd be better of with formal verifiers in legal systems.
Those who understand law know that formal verifiers cannot replace a judge, because every facet of law (the writing of it, the interpretation of it, the application of it, and the enforcement of it) has to account for all the vagueries of human existence.
No formal verifier can account for definitions that need to expand as the scope of human endeavor expands. No formal verifier can determine mens rea. No formal verifier can determine if something is obscene. No formal verifier can determine someone's mental competence. No formal verifier can cover all mitigating factors. No formal verifier can apply mercy where mercy is needed.
Consider a simple crime, murder. Let’s simplify it to “if you kill someone, that’s murder and you get life”
But then what if I’m being stabbed by the person I kill?
Okay so self defence.
But then what if I say it’s self defence but factually that’s incorrect, but I genuinely believed it was self defence?
What if I’m a soldier and I’m shooting an enemy?
What if I shoot them because they’re raping my child?
What if I’m shooting them because they raped my child ten years ago and I’ve been plotting my revenge ever since?
What if someone said they’ll shoot me if I didn’t shoot them?
What if I was in psychosis and thought they were going to kill me?
What if I thought they were a deer and shot them by mistake while hunting?
It turns out we have all these laws in this particular way because of thousands of years of work dealing with all of these issues.
And if you can’t sympathise with any of those cases, I hope you’re never called upon to decide anything involving other people.
But, we are hearing from one side, one perspective. The museum has not had a fair expression of their side here.
Court proceedings can look unfairly bizarre when unfairly reported. I am not saying this report is definitely unfair, but it is impossible to tell
There's a saying "You can't beat city hall!" If you sue a public body then it'll be a public prosecutor defending the case. They probably eat lunch with another public employee every day: the judge on your case. Who are you, a dirty prole, to attack the government?
In your first line, in trial courts where you create your record, you face the simplest judges with the least legal knowledge and experience who will quickly dismiss your case on a whim.
Only at the appellate level do you stand any remote chance of turning things in your favor, and only then if your case is absolutely indisputable. Don't expect any of the courts to look logically or fairly at your evidence, or to accept your testimony over that of the government.
Just look at chaps[0] here who made an absolutely concrete case for the release of a database schema under FOIA, and was represented by the smartest and highest respected law firm in the state, and still got smashed.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chaps
[1] "Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas" https://mchap.io/