Canadian Libraries Want $300,000 To Buy Games

AirborneGamer writes "The Toronto Public Library is asking for $300K to build up a collection of video games. They have not said if they will buy all types of games, or leave out the M-rated ones. As the City Councilor of Toronto said about the project, 'It may be the only time a young person comes in. It can act as a magnet to attract people. Once we get them in there, you can be darn sure that our librarians will be hard at work to introduce them to everything else the library can offer.' This is a good plan actually, and besides bringing kids into the library it will bring in parents and or guardians who otherwise may not visit the library on their own."

Wait what, this is new?

[dingen]

Back in the early '90ies, I got loads of games from the public city library in my home town. It was especially great for adventure games, because they have a limited replay value anyway. And my library got all the CD-ROM versions, which meant you could get full speech on games like Day of the Tentacle, which was awesome of course.

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Settle the financial crisis before free games

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year Toronto's debt goes up [toronto.ca], and every year Toronto property taxes go up, and every few years Toronto's unions go on strike to have their already large salaries increased. Maybe once the city can control its finances and its unions, then it can think about buying video games to attract children to the Library.

17 USC 109; what's the Canadian counterpart?

[tepples]

I'm sure there's a solution for this, as you can rent games from lots of places other than the library, right?

At least in the United States, 17 USC 109 reserves the right to rent or lend copies of computer programs exclusively to the copyright owner with three exceptions: 1. nonprofit libraries, 2. software embedded into a device that can't be copied out of the device, and 3. console games. So nonprofit libraries are the only place that one can try PC games without a demo before buying them. What does Canada's copyright statute say about this?

Re:Excellent example....

[FiloEleven]

And now that we have the internet, such that I or anybody else can download literally millions of free books (or just read wikipedia), the government-funded libraries are even less necessary.

You do realize that not all books are alike, yes? Even if there are three million free books available online, that's only a sixth of the books estimated to exist worldwide. And an in-depth book is better than Wikipedia for anything but the most cursory look at a topic. There's a reason Wikipedia requires sources, and there's a reason that most of those sources are books--many of which, I might add, you can't find on Gutenberg Project or Amazon. Libraries may indeed outlive their usefulness, but it hasn't happened yet.

"Government-funded" is a separate issue.