Movie rental businesses in Montréal are denouncing la Grande Bibliothèque (Québec’s newly constructed National Library) for (god forbid) lending audiovisual material. The owner of a Super-Club Vidéotron close to the library is crying unfair competition and is asking the library to remove all DVDs from its collection. (more here.) On a similar note, some music producers in Québec are asking the library to remove the CD burners from the library computers so that the CDs in the library’s collection can’t be copied. The library has flately refused, saying that the burners are essential for patrons to make copies of Québec’s heritage collection. (more here.) In the meantime, the library has seen over 664,000 visitors in the first 3 months alone. Perhaps private interests in Montréal would rather we all return to the good old days of libraries.
September 15th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
ya gotta love it. so what’s the role of government? to artificially prop up businesses? come on.
viva les biblioteques libre!