As reported by Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Court of Audit (Corte dei Conti) recently released a lengthy (220 pages!) report (source) on the activities of the Italian Ministry for Culture, touching on the PND (Piano Nazionale di Digitalizzazione) and on specific pricing guidelines released in April (D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023).
Ideologically we are pretty much aligned with Wikimedia’s position, but as a regular company that has to make money to survive, we can see the point of charging fees, if they were to generate significant revenue for museums and for those carrying out digitization and preservation efforts. We suspect that the monetization approach imagined by D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023 is never going to generate significant revenue.
Instead, as the Court of Audit report rightly points out, on page 155, the problems with the current approach are that it neglects dissemination, and prevents the kind of free reuse that generates value, which is not the same thing as revenue. Simply put, many potential users are dissuaded by the very possibility of having to negotiate a license.
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