On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 03:25:21AM +0000, Pigeon wrote: > They do lend non-free cassettes and CDs of copyrighted music at a quid > a shot or thereabouts. In at least Multnomah County and Washington County, Oregon, the libraries will loan books, cassettes, CDs, DVDs, VHS, and Super8 for free. Periodical archives are available on microfilm, but not for loan at most libraries (though you can print copies for about a nickel a page, copyright be damned; at least locally, public libraries are the last mainstream holdout against the US's unconstitutional unlimited copyright, and even they're under attack by publishers since they don't get royalties for the books they loan. The MPAA also grudges this idea, but the libraries are doing the right thing and holding thier ground. It's interesting and sad at the same time that the battle for freedom of information in the US has been reduced to the muted drone of the public library). > copies - Great idea, but in my experience libraries don't like giving > the public access to removable disk drives of any sort: they offer > internet access, but the boxes used have neither floppy nor CDRW > drives, so it's rather pointless having them really. Locally, they have floppy drives, but since they're windoze boxes, you're prohibited from bringing your own floppies, you must buy preformatted floppies from the library for virus prevention reasons. Yes, they do maintain the boxes surprisingly well, especially for publically accessible Windoze boxes. However, viruses were an acute problem when they has a BYOF policy, virus scanners be damned. -- .''`. Baloo Ursidae <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> : :' : proud Debian admin and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system
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