美国国家公共电台 NPR 3D Scans Help Preserve History, But Who Should Own Them?

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Google is giving millions of people access to 3D scans of ancient sites before they disappear. What happens to those scans is controversial. We take a look in this week's All Tech Considered.

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SHAPIRO: 3D scanning can make accurate models of historic sites, especially important for ones in the path of wars, natural disasters or climate change. But as NPR's Laura Sydell reports, some archaeologists and historians worry about the way these digital replicas 1 are being used.

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE 2: Bagan is an ancient city in Myanmar. It happens to be located on a seismic 3 fault. On August 24, 2016, a tourist, David Greco, was there videotaping.

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DAVID GRECO: There was just an earthquake. That temple crumbled 4. Oh, my God, I was just standing 5 there. It just crumbled.

SYDELL: And it wasn't just one temple. Dozens were damaged. One temple stands out for Chance Coughenour, a manager at Google Arts & Culture.

CHANCE COUGHENOUR: This is a temple that has incredible murals floor to ceiling across the interpassageways and the interchamber of the temple.

SYDELL: The temple is called Ananda Ok Kyaung. It's covered with murals about Buddhism 6 and key moments in the Buddha's life. It was popular with tourists. But since the earthquake...

COUGHENOUR: That temple itself is inaccessible 7 if you physically 8 go to the site today.

SYDELL: Fortunately, Ananda Ok Kyaung was one of many temples that was 3D scanned before the earthquake. The scans are on Google's Arts & Culture site. They allow you to virtually wander the halls of the temple, look up close at paintings, turn the building over and look at its chambers 9 from below. Or you can take a virtual tour with Bettany Hughes, a historian and broadcaster.

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BETTANY HUGHES: On the face and wall and the wall to to the right are garudas, a type of mythical 10 bird.

SYDELL: Google Arts & Culture is a little different from the rest of Google. It's a nonprofit inside the company. It works with museums and other nonprofits such as the Frick Collection and the Center for Jewish history to put high-quality images online, though Google is still collecting data on you. The images of the temples in Bagan are part of a collaboration 11 with CyArk, a nonprofit that does 3D scans of historic sites. Scans include Mayan ruins like Chichen Itza or the Al Azem palace in Syria - around 200 in all. John Ristevski, the CEO of CyArk, says its original mission was to create high-quality scans that could be used as a blueprint 12 to rebuild sites. But the scans were just sitting on a private server where the public couldn't see them.

JOHN RISTEVSKI: CyArk has had the will to open it up for a long time, but we haven't had the way or the means.

SYDELL: CyArk partnered with Google Arts & Culture because they offered free cloud storage and the tools to create an accessible online experience. Google's Coughenour says the company doesn't make money off the site, but it does fit in with Google's mission to make the world's information available and useful. Or it could be that it's an attempt by a large corporation to wrap itself in the sheen of culture.

ETHAN WATRALL: Google is not a cultural institution. Google is not a museum.

SYDELL: Ethan Watrall is an archaeologist, a professor at Michigan State University and a member of the Society for American Archaeology 13, a professional trade group. Watrall believes it's all about promoting Google.

WATRALL: They want to make this material accessible so people will browse 14 it and be filled with wonder by it. But at its core, it's all about advertisements and driving traffic.

SYDELL: Watrall thinks these images belong on a museum site. There's another issue for some archaeologists and art historians. CyArk owns the copyright of the scans, not the countries where the sites are located. That means the countries need CyArk's permission to use these images for commercial purposes.

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, points to a long history of Western nations taking cultural artifacts for their own use. Egypt's been fighting for years to get back a bust 15 of Queen Nefertiti from Germany. It took decades for the Metropolitan 16 Museum of Art in New York to return items from King Tut's tomb. Australia's indigenous 17 people have been fighting with the British Museum for the return of ancestral artifacts. Thompson calls CyArk's copyrighted scans digital colonialism.

ERIN THOMPSON: The real problem is that you have to trust whoever owns the copyright to do the right thing with those images. And there's no legal way for a country to protest the use of its cultural heritage sites.

SYDELL: CyArk says it copyrights the scans so no one can use them in an inappropriate way. But critics like Thompson think the countries where these sites live should be the ones making these choices. Laura Sydell, NPR News.