In 2017, researcher Cosmo Wenman began requesting that Paris's Rodin Museum identify and release 3D scans of Auguste Rodin's sculptures — works in the public domain that the museum had publicly funded digitization programs produce. What followed was an eight-year legal battle that ended in December 2025 with France's Conseil d'État (the highest court for administrative justice) ruling against openness, in a decision Wenman says contradicts the court's own earlier findings and France's own cultural-heritage guidance.
The case turns on a specific class of digital object: 3D point-cloud scans. These are laser-generated datasets of spatial coordinates that record surface geometry; in cultural heritage, they are typically stored in open, plaintext formats and are routinely used by museums, universities, and governments worldwide. The French government itself publishes petabytes of point-cloud data from aerial surveys of French territory, and the Ministry of Culture has published guidance on formatting and sharing such documents in the heritage sector.
Wenman's path to court began when the Rodin Museum refused his FOI requests. A CADA (Commission on Access to Administrative Documents) opinion — the French government's own advisory body on document access — ruled the scans were administrative documents and must be disclosed. The museum's director did not dispute the analysis but wrote to the Ministry of Culture that she planned to ignore FOI law and force Wenman to sue.
In 2019, Wenman filed in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris, joined by advocacy groups Communia, Wikimédia France, and La Quadrature du Net. The museum's litigation strategy, Wenman alleges, included baseless insinuations that he was a counterfeiter, claims that it could not figure out how to use its own scan data, and contradictory briefs — asserting both that scans were unusable and that they were a counterfeiter threat. In one brief it confirmed holding a scan of Les Trois Ombres; in the next it denied the sculpture had ever been scanned.
In December 2023, the Paris court ruled the scans were administrative documents, ordered their release, and awarded Wenman €1,500. The Rodin Museum and Ministry of Culture did not appeal; they ignored the order.
The Conseil d'État appeal hinged on point-cloud formats. The rapporteure publique (the court's own legal analyst) opened her presentation by invoking René Magritte's surrealist painting The Treachery of Images — "This is Not a Pipe" — and declared that "sometimes a document is not a document." She recited the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française definition of "document" aloud, then, Wenman writes, stumbled when the definition appeared to argue against her position. She asserted that point clouds were neither documents nor administrative documents, offered exceptions to FOI law that had already been examined and rejected by both CADA and the lower court, and proposed that delivering copies would be too burdensome for a museum that had held the files for eight years.
The Conseil d'État's written decision went beyond the rapporteure's argument. It ruled the scans were legally indistinguishable from physical reproductions — part of the museum's inalienable collection — and that French FOI law was therefore inapplicable. By implication, CADA's favorable analyses and the Paris court's 2023 ruling were erroneous. Wenman was ordered to pay the museum €3,000 and received no written notice of the decision.
What remains uncertain. The packet contains only Wenman's account; the court's full written decision and the CADA opinion are not quoted. The precise legal basis the Conseil d'État used to reclassify publicly funded scans as "inalienable collection" items is not explained in the source, and it is not clear whether the decision creates broader precedent for other cultural-heritage FOI cases. Wenman's claim that the court ignored its own 800-page dossier is uncorroborated by the court's reasoning, which the packet does not reproduce.
A meaningful unknown is the other side's motivation. The museum's briefs raised trade secrecy, counterfeiting, commercial reuse, and economic competition as FOI exceptions — the last drawing the judges' apparent approval. Whether the museum's resistance was driven by revenue concerns over reproductions, genuine legal uncertainty about digital surrogates, or something else is not resolved by the supplied material.