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arjie • today at 12:11 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

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.