Category: reason

American diplomat William B. Taylor, the chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, told congressional investigators during his impeachment inquiry testimony on Wednesday that both a White House meeting and the release of a military aid package to the country were contingent on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly pursuing anti-corruption probes sought by President Donald Trump.

Taylor testified that Gordon Sondland, the Ambassador to the European Union, relayed that “everything” was dependent on Zelenskiy’s announcement that he would both investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, and look into a theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election to benefit former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Taylor also detailed a conversation he had on Friday, Nov. 8, with David Holmes, the counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine. Taylor says that Holmes told him he had been privy to a July 26 conversation between Trump and Sondland. On that call, a day after the much-discussed exchange between Zelenskiy and Trump, the president asked the E.U. ambassador where he was with “the investigations.” The Ukrainians were “ready to move forward,” Sondland allegedly replied.

The ambassador then told Holmes “that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which [Rudy] Giuliani was pressing for,” referring to the president’s personal lawyer.

In Taylor’s opening statement, he stressed what he saw as the vital importance of the $400 million in security aid to Ukraine, which was appropriated by Congress to help the Eastern European country fend off Russian military aggression. “It’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor said.

Daniel Goldman, counsel for House Democrats, asked Taylor, who was appointed to be the ambassador of Ukraine under former President George W. Bush, if he had ever experienced another instance of aid being blocked over “personal or political interests of the president of the United States.”

“No, Mr. Goldman, I have not,” Taylor said.

Also testifying was George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who told investigators that the notion that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Clinton is not substantiated. “I think it’s amply clear that Russian interference” affected the election, he said.

On the subject of Hunter Biden’s involvement on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Kent said he reported his reservations to the office of the Vice President that there might be “the perception of a conflict of interest.” When asked about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s successful attempt to depose a prosecutor in Ukraine, Kent told Goldman that there is no evidence to support the notion that he did so to assist his son. Trump has accused Biden of intervening to help the younger Biden avoid any potential corruption probe of Burisma, despite the fact that several international agencies lobbied for the prosecutor’s removal on corruption accusations.

“To your knowledge is there any factual basis to support those allegations?” Goldman asked.

“None whatsoever,” Kent replied.

“When Vice President acted in Ukraine, did he act in accordance with official U.S. policy?” Goldman asked.

“He did,” Kent said.

House Republicans dismissed the impeachment inquiry, with ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.) equating it with a “carefully orchestrated media smear campaign.”

In his line of questioning, Steve Castor, counsel for House GOP, sought to characterize allegations of Ukrainian corruption—both during the 2016 election and in Burisma—as valid and worthy of exploration apart from any explicit reward Trump stood to gain. During one exchange, he repeatedly pressed Taylor to admit that he “certainly could appreciate President Trump’s concerns” about Ukrainian election interference.

“I don’t know the exact nature of President Trump’s concerns,” Taylor said, adding that he “was surprised by them.”

Castor also portrayed Hunter Biden as unqualified for the role he held at Burisma, asking Taylor if he felt he had the proper experience to work at the energy company.

“I believe that companies build their boards with a variety of reasons in order to promote their business plans,” Taylor replied.

When Republican representatives took their respective turns probing the witnesses, they coalesced around two primary points: that Taylor and Kent could have both separately misheard and misunderstood all of their exchanges with those in Trump’s circle, and that, since the aid was eventually released without Ukraine investigating Biden, there was a quid—but no quo.

Rep. Mike Turner (R–Ohio) cast the conversations as hearsay, although the statements relayed during testimony on Wednesday would not qualify as such. “If I’m sitting here and I overhear your conversation right in front of me, I have heard it,” explained CBS legal analyst Rikki Klieman, “so when I repeat your words this is something I’ve perceived with my own ears, the same way as if I saw something. So we’re getting the legal terms into this mismatched.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio)—the combative congressman added to the House Intelligence Committee just last week—emphasized the latter defense, highlighting that no investigations took place before Ukraine’s aid was reinstated.

“Those two things didn’t happen, so you had to be wrong,” he said.

“The other thing that happened when that assistance was on hold,” Taylor replied, “was that we shook the confidence in our reliability.”

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San Francisco business owner Joey Mucha wants to convert an arcade repair shop he owns into a simple arcade and restaurant space, a use his property is already zoned for. Yet he has been stymied by neighborhood activists who argue that his project will further contribute to the gentrification of the Mission District.

With the help of the city’s notoriously cumbersome planning process, these activists have delayed Mucha’s project for months already, and they might succeed in killing it off entirely. Should that happen, his arcade will become yet another promising business idea snuffed out by a pervasive NIMBYism that is trying to freeze America’s cities in place.

“I’m hemorrhaging money at the moment to keep my employees on [and] to weather this storm,” Mucha tells Reason.”If this gets voted down, I will likely have to slim down my already-small business to survive, to support my family.”

Opposing Mucha’s plan is Kevin Ortiz—an activist affiliated with local anti-gentrification groups Cultural Action Network (CAN) and United to Save the Mission (USM)—who has asked the city’s planning commission to stop Mucha from setting up an arcade.

An arcade space, Ortiz has argued in planning applications and in the press, will cost the neighborhood valuable repair space and the blue collar jobs that come with it—all so wealthy newcomers to the city can have yet another place to party.

Come Thursday, the commission—which has absolute say over most building permits—will decide whether Mucha can go ahead with his plans for his property, or if he’ll have to abandon them entirely.

Mucha’s request for a permit for his arcade should have been a relatively straightforward affair: His family already owns the property in question. The only occupant of the building was his own arcade rental business, Joey the Cat, which uses the space to store and service a collection of Skee-Ball, pinball, and Whac-A-Mole machines. The site is already zoned to allow for arcade and restaurant use, meaning it doesn’t require special variances or conditional use permits. On top of that, most of the neighbors are OK with Mucha’s plan to add additional public space to the neighborhood.

Not being able to move ahead with his arcade would be both a financial hardship and a personal tragedy.

Mucha says he got into the arcade business almost by accident when he purchased a used Skee-Ball machine off eBay for $500 a decade ago so that he could hone his skills to play in a Skee-Ball league.

“I practiced on it, and figured out how it worked. I disassembled it and reassembled it,” he tells Reason, saying that he soon started to rent out the machine to clients of the start-up firm he worked at, where he had a marketing job.

His side gig proved profitable enough that he started buying more machines and placing them in bars and restaurants around town. Eventually, he quit his day job, and made arcade rentals his full-time occupation.

At first, he ran the business out of his apartment, then a shipping container storage area, and, after that, out of a section of a city-owned warehouse. In 2014, with the help of his family, he purchased his current building on 19th Street in the Mission from the owner-operator of an autobody shop who has since retired.

Having his own space allowed Mucha’s business to offer another service: private events.

“That happened organically. We’ve got these games, we fix them up, they’re staged here ready to go out to bars and events, why don’t we see if people want to come play them,” says Mucha, who started renting out his repair space for corporate off-site retreats, non-profit events, and even neighbors’ birthday parties.

These events required Mucha to get permits from the San Francisco Fire Department and Entertainment Commission, which he did.

But despite his property being zoned to allow for arcade use, the site’s past use as an auto body shop required him to get a change of use permit—something he didn’t have, and without which his private events were technically illegal.

In March 2018, a complaint was filed against Mucha for hosting private events at his business. A July 2018-dated notice of enforcement from the Planning Department informed Mucha that, while a game arcade was allowed at his property, he would still need to obtain a change of use permit to convert it from a production, distribution, and repair use.

Realizing he’d need to go through the city’s labyrinthine planning process, Mucha hired a permit expeditor, and together they started trying to abate the planning department’s complaint.

At first, he tried to get his building converted to some sort of trade shop that would allow him to keep his repair operations onsite while still hosting private events. That, he says, proved unworkable.

Instead, Mucha decided he would move the repair portion of his business to a different location and convert his 19th Street place to a public arcade and restaurant space—a major undertaking.

“We are talking about a $1-million-dollar project,” he says. “We’re talking structural [change], build a mezzanine, build a kitchen, build four bathrooms, redo the entryway, cover up all these building and code things.”

In April, he filed an application with the Planning Department for permission to change the use of his building and perform these extensive renovations.

On June 25, the Planning Department issued a notice informing the public that if they objected to Mucha’s permit application they’d have the standard 30 days to file for discretionary review.

Discretionary review is a process through which any member of the public can ask San Francisco’s Planning Commission—a seven-member appointed body that oversees the Planning Department—to review the application for a permit.

Even if a permit application complies with all laws on the books, as Mucha’s does, the Planning Commission still has the authority to deny the permit, or condition its approval on the applicant agreeing to do things not otherwise required by the zoning code or city regulations.

The discretionary review process is frequently used and abused by NIMBYs and activists to stop or delay disfavored projects, whether that’s a falafel shop, an apartment building, or a single-family home. Even if a request for discretionary review is denied, it can still hold up a project by months.

That is exactly what has happened to Mucha.

On the last possible day, Ortiz filed an application for a discretionary review, listing a number of reasons why he thought Mucha’s arcade would be bad for the neighborhood.

“One of the main threats to the Mission and its working-class and Latino families who are being driven out by gentrification right now is the conversions from blue-collar work sites and community-serving sites to destination and party sites for wealthier newcomers to the city,” reads Ortiz’s application. “This proposal is a quintessential example of this problem and will contribute to further displacement impacts.”

Ortiz also complains that Mucha had already marketed his space for corporate events, and hosted parties from both Google and Uber.

In further comments to the online publication Mission Local, Ortiz explained that he thought yet another alcohol-serving business in the Mission would increase property crime and bring more traffic to the area.

“It’s not designed for families,” he said to Mission Local. (Reason reached out to Ortiz for comment, but received no reply.)

These kinds of complaints are common from CAN and USM activists, which often argue against new development on the grounds that it will sacrifice the traditionally working-class character of the predominately Hispanic neighborhood for the benefit of rich techies.

A quick scan of USM’s Facebook page shows they’ve organized numerous protests against all sorts of projects this year, including a new cannabis lounge, a new gym, a new office building, and new housing.

Come Thursday, the group will assemble at city hall to oppose Mucha’s project, which their Facebook event describes as contributing to the “Disneyfication” of the neighborhood.

Mucha disputes this characterization of his business as an agent of gentrification, saying that in addition to corporate events, he’s hosted community groups, birthday parties for kids, and neighborhood gatherings.

It’s a characterization that rankles some of the neighbors too, including Marlene Samson, who owns the janitorial business next door. Samson, a lifelong Mission resident, says that everyone from her nieces to her mother to neighborhood nuns have participated in events at Mucha’s business.

“One of my nieces went to the venue for a child’s party and it went off without a hitch. The kids had to be pulled out of there, they didn’t want to go home,” Samson tells Reason. “How much more neighborhood can you be when you have the nuns and the kids…and all the neighborhood people there?”

Samson submitted a letter of support for Mucha’s project to the planning commission, as have a number of other businesses, nonprofits, the Mission Merchant Association, and even California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who had met Mucha previously (and wrote to say that she was “impressed by Mr. Mucha’s entrepreneurship” and that she “support[s] his vision to transform the space”).

Ortiz, as mentioned, filed his discretionary review application in late July, but Mucha’s project didn’t end up getting scheduled for a Planning Commission hearing until November 7. A public notice of the hearing was issued by the Planning Department on October 18.

However, when Mucha showed up to the planning commission on November 7, Ortiz was not present. A Facebook post dated that same day pictures him attending the California Alcohol Policy Alliance’s annual summit in Los Angeles, which was held on the same day.

Another project opponent, who identified herself as Spike Kahn, was present on the day, but asked commissioners to delay the hearing as she had just heard about the project that morning, and needed more time to prepare.

This is despite an October 30-dated Planning Department packet on the discretionary review hearing listing a Spike Kahn as already having sent a letter opposing the project. (Given that this is San Francisco, it is improbable but not impossible there are two different people named Spike opposing the same project.)

Mucha pleaded with the commissioners to go ahead with proceedings anyways, saying he had been trying to legalize his business for over a year and that further delays would cost him time and money he didn’t have.

Instead, planning commissioners voted 3-2 to postpone the hearing to this Thursday.

Mucha describes the postponement as a deliberate pressure tactic, saying “any delay can be catastrophic for my business.

Even if that’s not the case, it is remarkable that despite it being Mucha’s business up for discussion at the hearing, most of the commissioners decided to privilege the interests of his opponents in the planning process—one of whom hadn’t bothered to show up, and the other of whom showed up supposedly unprepared, even though they were identified as a project opponent a week before the hearing.

For most of the time that his project has been working its way through the planning process, Mucha has been unable to host private events—events which he says had up as much as 40 percent of his revenue.

Fortunately, in early October, the Planning Department gave him temporary permission to host twice-weekly events during November and December while his permanent change of use application worked its way through the planning process.

That, says Mucha, is helping him stay afloat. Should his application to convert his space into an arcade get rejected, Mucha predicts that he will have to let his two employees go and return to being a sole proprietor.

But what rankles him the most about the process, he says, is the accusation that his business won’t be family-friendly.

“I just had a kid. I live on the block,” he says. “Why would I try to make a space that isn’t family-friendly when I’m raising a family within 200 feet?”

Barring further delays, Thursday’s hearing will decide the fate of Mucha’s business. Win or lose, his story is yet another example of how the city’s planning process forces business owners to go through hell just so they can eke out a living.

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In order to have a good chance of preventing global average temperatures from exceeding 1.5°C by 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Global Warming of 1.5°C report issued in October, 2018, asserted that global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions must decline by about 45 to 50 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 (and reach net zero around 2050). This is not going to happen, if the new International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2019 (WEO) report is to be believed.

The WEO projects future energy consumption and emissions trajectories using three different scenarios. In the current trends scenario, countries make no additional efforts to curb fossil fuel consumption and associated emissions. In the stated policies scenario, the agency presumes that all countries will mostly abide by the commitments they’ve made with respect to reducing fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. And the third sustainable development scenario incorporates a set of ambitious policies that assumes significant gains in energy efficiency, the expansive deployment of renewable power generation, carbon capture, and sequestration technologies.

Since most of the IEA report is behind a paywall, let’s rely on the data supplied by the invaluable Carbon Brief to set out the scenarios.

In the “current policies” scenario, world energy consumption grows at 1.3 percent per year and global carbon dioxide emissions continue rising through 205,0 which is the year that the IPCC 1.5°C report says that the world needs to reach net-zero emissions.

In “stated policies,” the IEA projects that global energy consumption will rise by 1 percent per year until 2040, which is half the 2 percent rate of growth between 2000 and 2018. About half of that consumption increase will be supplied by renewables and one-third by natural gas. While global carbon dioxide emission growth slows, it would nevertheless rise from 34.7 gigatons in 2017 to 37.1 gigatons in 2030. Global emissions were about 32 gigatons in 2010, so a 45 percent cut means that emissions would have to fall by 14.4 gigatons by 2030.

Are countries likely to fulfill their stated energy and emissions policies?  A new analysis just released by the Universal Ecological Fund, The Truth Behind the Climate Pledges, strongly suggests that this is a doubtful prospect. The report notes that “at least 130 nations, including four of the top five world’s largest emitters, are falling far short of contributing to meeting the 50 percent global emissions reductions required by 2030 to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

Even in the IEA’s ambitious Sustainable Development scenario, global CO2 emissions decline to 17 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, 48 percent by 2040, and 68 percent by 2050. According to the IEA, this puts the world “on course for net-zero emissions by 2070,” which has a 50 percent chance of limiting average warming to 1.65°C above pre-industrial levels.

Man-made climate change is a big problem, but the new IEA report persuasively shows that steep, immediate cuts in global energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions are a pipe dream.

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“Secret Service research findings [indicate that] targeted school violence is preventable,” writes U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) Director James Murray in a new NTAC report. All schools have to do is treat any student in any sort of distress as a potential danger to everybody else and respond accordingly. That sounds nice, but the plan completely ignores the potential for traumatizing innocent students.

Titled “Protecting America’s Schools: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence,” NTAC’s report advocates for schools throughout the country to adopt violence prevention strategies that are heavily focused on monitoring students for behavioral issues and encouraging others in the school system to anonymously report behavior they deem “concerning.”

The 35-page report analyzes 41 incidents of “targeted school violence” that occurred at K-12 schools throughout the country from 2008-2017. NTAC defines “targeted school violence” as: “any incident in which (i) a current or recently former K-12 school student (ii) purposefully used a weapon (iii) to cause physical injury to, or the death of, at least one other student and/or school employee (iv) in or on the immediate property of the school (v) while targeting in advance one or more specific and/or random student(s) and/or employee(s).”

The NTAC report says that “the threshold for intervention should be low, so that schools can identify students in distress before their behavior escalates to the level of eliciting concerns about safety.” The report also found that most attackers had experienced some form of bullying at school and had displayed “observable mental health symptoms,” such as signs of depression or suicidal thoughts, before their rampages.

One of NTAC’s recommendations is for schools to adopt the threat prevention measures the Secret Service outlined in their 2018 guide, “Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model: An Operational Guide for Preventing School Violence.” That 2018 plan called for examining students’ social media posts, searching through their desks at school, and monitoring how students are handling breakups.

The NTAC says its new study isn’t intended to provide a perfect psychological or behavioral profile of students who might commit an act of violence. And while it does not outright state that students who are depressed or have been victims of bullying are more likely to commit acts of violence, it does list a “depressed mood” as a red flag. That’s so vague that even a student having a bad day could be viewed as a potential threat, let alone a student who is clinically depressed or is a victim of harassment.

While many of the students profiled by the study shared similar experiences and behaviors, the study fails to establish how, exactly, the students could have been appropriately identified as threats before they acted.

In fact, a Department of Defense-commissioned study in 2012 found that in the case of targeted violence, while there are identifiable “pre-existing behaviors” that violent actors tend to portray, these “symptoms” are so general and widespread that false alarms are inevitable, making the reliability of violence prediction methods shaky at best. Despite this conclusion, that same study also suggests that “frequent profanity” is a potential indicator of violence. Using governmental parameters to identify potential attackers might only serve the purpose of stigmatizing students who will never pose a threat.

The NTAC praises these problematic violence prevention programs in its report, such as Colorado’s Safe2Tell. Safe2Tell is an anonymous reporting platform that encourages people to report students who might pose a risk to themselves or others in hopes of getting the student help before he or she acts out violently. Safe2Tell recently garnered its highest number of reports to the system during the 2018-2019 school year, logging 19,861 anonymous tips. Notably, most of these reports were about suicide risks, drugs, and bullying, not threats of violence against others, and another 197 were reports about misuses of Safe2Tell. Only 499 (2.5 percent) of the reports were actually about planned school attacks, and Safe2Tell has provided no further information about tips that were relevant to protecting students from other students.

Unfortunately, violence prevention programs are abusable. With Safe2Tell, the police determined that 541 of the tips made to Safe2Tell during the 2018-2019 school year were deliberate hoaxes or false. One high school freshman in Jefferson County was falsely accused via Safe2Tell four separate times over the course of nine months. The 14-year-old was accused of acts ranging from telling others she was going to commit suicide to posting another student’s nude photos online. FOX31 reported that the student found the ordeal traumatic, telling the news outlet that she, “couldn’t stop crying because [she] was scared,” when police showed up at her door to investigate the reports.

Similarly, Nathan Myers, a student at Loveland High School in Loveland, Colo., was reported for taking a picture of a pistol and posting it on SnapChat with the caption, “Finna be lit,” before a family outing to the shooting range. Myers was later cleared of all wrongdoing after the school district realized he posed no threat, but according to Myers’ mother, when Myers met with district officials prior to his return to school, “They told him he was a good kid, they liked him, and they never believed he was making a threat against the school, but that ‘you know we have to do this.'” Jay Stooksberry, covering the incident for Reason, said that, “The mockery [that Myers suffered as a result of the incident] was bad enough that Nathan begged his parents to be homeschooled.” Is preventing hypothetical violence really a good excuse for traumatizing innocent children?

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum notes, “even if certain “red flags” are common among mass shooters, almost none of the people who display those signs are bent on murderous violence.” The vast majority of those who are depressed or bullied will never commit an act of violence, and a comprehensive threat assessment strategy might lead to students who fall into those categories being viewed as potential attackers, even when they pose no threat. As Sullum says, “Given the potential for mass stigma, invasions of privacy, and violations of due process, I’d say we can do a lot worse than failing [to successfully identify potentially violent individuals.]”

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For more than a decade, museums around the world have been making high-quality 3D scans of important sculptures and ancient artifacts. Some institutions, such as the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Denmark, have forward-thinking programs that freely share their 3D scans with the public, allowing us to view, copy, adapt, and experiment with the underlying works in ways that have never before been possible. But many institutions keep their scans out of public view.

The Louvre, for example, has 3D-scanned the Nike of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence 3D-scanned Michelangelo’s David. The Bargello has a scan of Donatello’s David. Numerous works by Auguste Rodin, including the Gates of Hell, have been scanned by the Musée Rodin in Paris. The Baltimore Museum of Art got in on the Rodin action when it scanned The Thinker. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has scans of works by Bernini, Michelangelo, and many others. But instead of allowing them to be studied, copied, and adapted by scholars, artists, and digitally savvy art lovers, these museums have kept these scans, and countless more, under lock and key.

In Berlin, the state-funded Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection has a high-quality, full-color 3D scan of the most iconic portrait sculpture ever produced, the 3,364-year-old Bust of Nefertiti. It has held this artifact since 1920, just a few years after its discovery in Amarna, Egypt; Egypt has been demanding its repatriation ever since it first went on display. The bust is one of the most copied works of ancient Egyptian art, and has become a cultural symbol of Berlin. For reasons the museum has difficulty explaining, this scan too is off-limits to the public.

Rather, it was off-limits. I was able to obtain it after a 3-year-long freedom of information effort directed at the organization that oversees the museum.

In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws, which grant everyone an unconditional right to access official information from federal agencies. That goes for any official record—conventional files, electronic records, drawings, graphics, plans, and sound or video recordings.

The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.

In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as “the gift shop defense.”

While the law required it to grant me access to the scan, it also gave SPK discretion over the mode of that access. The foundation offered to let me “inspect” the data in a controlled setting, either in its offices in Berlin or, since I live in southern California, at the German consulate in Los Angeles.

The organization was treating its scan of Nefertiti like a state secret.

My ultimate goal in all this was to convince SPK to make its scan freely available to the public, without any access or usage restrictions. A mere inspection of the scan would be worthless to me, but I wanted to see SPK’s definition of legally mandated “access” in action before I pressed them further. I accepted their offer to inspect the data at the consulate, but the consulate then mysteriously withdrew its offer to assist. Instead, SPK made arrangements for me to inspect the scan at the Los Angeles office of the law firm WilmerHale, one of the most expensive, well-connected law firms in the world.

The inspection was, as I anticipated, absurd. I told SPK as much, though in more diplomatic terms. The foundation had provided a slow, underpowered laptop that was barely capable of displaying the large files. You can watch my video of the inspection here:

Without direct transmission of the data to me, it was simply impossible to effectively examine the scan, let alone learn anything new about the original artifact.

I told SPK the inspection was inadequate. I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.

I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.

SPK’s response, five months later, was revealing.

The foundation rejected the idea of accepting a donation in exchange for unrestricted public access to the Nefertiti scan, but it nonetheless invited me to negotiate over terms and a price for a license to use the scan for my own commercial purposes.

SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so. In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.

All SPK’s reasons for not giving me the Nefertiti data fell apart. The gift shop defense had been smoke.

As if in recognition of this, there was something else in their response—something I did not expect. A USB drive containing the Nefertiti scan.

SPK reiterated that it had no legal obligation to give me the data in this direct format. I was receiving the scan this way, the organization explained, only to address my specific concerns about being able to examine it effectively. The foundation emphasized that it was providing this to me only for informational purposes, not for commercial use. It was SPK’s way of saying, “Here it is, now leave us alone.”

While it was satisfying to see SPK bend, what I’d really wanted was for them to liberalize their policy and make the Nefertiti data available to everyone, without usage restrictions. But they’d given it only to me, and they had prohibited commercial uses. By fulfilling their legal obligations, even if so narrowly, I no longer had freedom of information laws as a tool to push SPK for wider access.

When I looked at the data for the first time, though, there was another surprise.

To mark their territory, SPK had inartfully carved a copyright claim directly into the flat underside of the 3D model. And without explanation, it had included a Creative Commons “CC BY-NC-SA” license.

It’s unclear which elements of their digital copy of the Bust of Nefertiti SPK imagines it has a copyright in. The original artifact is clearly in the public domain. And copyright attaches to original works; copyrighting a copy doesn’t make sense. Especially if the original is in the public domain. It has a chilling effect on the public’s lawful use of public domain works, and creates paradoxes in enforcement. In any event, whatever you make of SPK’s ambiguous copyright graffiti, there can be no doubt about the meaning of the Creative Commons license. It requires users of the data to identify the original source of the material, and it bars commercial uses. But it also explicitly allows for the copying, redistribution, adaptation, and transformation of the data. The license also states that users “do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain.”

So there it is; SPK appears to have almost completely buckled.

I say almost because, even after all this time, they still left it to me to actually put their Nefertiti scan online and make it available to a wider audience. They should be embarrassed. I don’t have curators, an administrative staff, or a legal department. SPK, with its state-sponsored mission to serve the public, has an extensive web presence and a 390 million euro annual budget.

You’d think SPK could spend half an hour throwing a webpage together and uploading the data for everyone to access. But they haven’t, so I’ve done it for them.

I’ve put SPK’s Nefertiti scan online, exactly as I received it, under the terms of the Creative Commons license. You can download it here. All my correspondence with SPK is available here.

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