Returned artefacts may come home without their scans

Consider a restitution that goes entirely correctly. The agreement is signed, the crate is packed, there is a ceremony with two ministers and a photographer walking backwards. Then, some months later, a curator in the receiving country requests the high-resolution model made during pre-shipment documentation, and is offered a licence. Not a refusal — a licence. Ownership of the object and ownership of its model would have been settled in two different places, under two different bodies of law, by two different sets of people who never met.

From a desk in the receiving museum the asymmetry would look plain enough. The object arrives, goes into a climate case, and is seen by whoever can reach the building. The scan goes everywhere else: into the lecture slides, the textbook, the conservation comparison, the print used by a school that will never afford a trip, the game studio that wants a plausible bronze. The object would be home. The version almost everybody actually looks at would not be.

The legal knot is genuine and nobody tied it on purpose. A scan of an object that is far out of copyright is not obviously a new work, and jurisdictions disagree about whether the effort of digitising creates a right at all. The answer would therefore depend less on the object's history than on where the server happens to be, which is not a principle anybody would defend out loud.

The returning institution would claim no ownership in public. It would offer instead a licence described as documentation continuity: free for academic use, priced for commercial use, renewable every five years, and renegotiated by whichever staff happen to be in the room at renewal. Each clause would be reasonable. The effect would be that the file has a landlord.

The obvious answer — rescan it — would turn out to cost more than the receiving museum's annual acquisition budget, and would in any case produce a second model that disagrees slightly with the first. The earlier scan would already be the canonical record, cited in the literature and embedded in every catalogue that matters. A restoration decision taken in the 1960s would be frozen in it, and disputes about that decision would be arguments about a file.

The wider effect would be a new annex in restitution agreements, appearing somewhere after insurance and before the photography protocol, headed digital rights. It would be short. It would be drafted by whoever has a lawyer available, and read, as annexes are, by nobody at the ceremony.

A curator in the receiving country would put it in the plainest possible terms. The crate was the easy part.