An usually high-tech form of pseudo-theft, executed by a pair of artists, has resulted in a high-resolution scan of the famous Queen Nefertiti statue at the heart of a dispute between Germany and Egypt. Avoiding the watchful gaze of four guards at the Neues Museum in Berlin, Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles painstakingly scanned the 3,500-year-old bust over the course of three hours using a Kinect.

Technically, nothing was taken, but the exact contours of the bust are now publicly available, open-sourced by the artists in question.

Their work, itself a sort of art project, is in part a commentary on the question of art ownership and accessibility. The statue in question has been in Germany for over 100 years, but the Egyptian government has been lobbying to get it back.

Since the release of their data dump, thousands of people have downloaded a virtual copy of the statue either to examine or 3D-print a copy. While this is not the same as preservation, it does add layers of redundancy for future researchers should something ever happen to the original figure. Many galleries are already making high-resolution images of famous paintings and drawings available on the web, and there is no reason a similar tactic could not be taken with three-dimensional works as well.

Consider what Le Corbusier would think if he were alive to see his famous church in France duplicated as a Chinese barbecue restaurant. Or imagine what an Austrian village  must feel about its entire township being copied to a lake in China. But more on that later – first: Zaha Hadid now is experiencing it all in real time, as she races to complete her original before its copycat takes shape.

Copycats exist in all disciplines, but reputation-sensitive architects are often self-policing, as they want their work to stand out as original – but there are exceptions. Hadid’s new project is the victim of the bold copiers (above) are not only building an identical complex to her Wangjing SOHO (below). And while the developers of the legitimate project may well be able to sue, it would only be for damages – not to stop (or undo) construction.

From Der Spiegel: “Satoshi Ohashi, project director at Zaha Hadid Architects for the SOHO complex that is now being cloned, said: ‘It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project.’ From these, he added, ‘you could work out a similar building if you are technically very capable, but this would only be a rough simulation of the architecture.'”

As for the aforementioned village: Der Spiegel covered this strange phenomena a while back as well. Pictured above is the Chinese copy (top) of the Austrian original (bottom). Architects from China, passing as tourists, simply documented the entire town of 800, and, without permission, planned to replicate it back home as part of a large development. This may, of course, turn into a mixed blessing in the end – after all, it will almost certainly boost tourism as people experience the copy and seek out the original.