The British Museum is facing legal action from the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) over its refusal to allow the 3D scanning of a piece in its Parthenon Marble collection, The Guardian reports.
The IDA is seeking to reproduce a part of the relief from the temple’s south facade using 3D printing.
According to the IDA’s executive director, Roger Michel, the UK heritage group will be filing an injunction “by the end of the week requesting the court to order the British Museum to grant our request.”
“Our aim is to give people a chance to see just how extraordinary a copy can be,” Michel continued and stressed that previous copies of the Parthenon Marbles have been “low-quality plaster casts.”
In a statement to The Guardian about the IDA’s threat of legal action, a British Museum spokesperson said it was not possible to routinely accommodate all requests from “private organisations – such as the IDA – alongside academics and institutions who wish to study the collection.”
The spokesperson also added that it already used cutting-edge technologies to explore and share its collection and had facilitated visits from the Acropolis Museum in 2013 and 2017 for 3D scanning.
Source: The Guardian.
