Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cybérie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. Jean- Pierre wrote in August 1999: "The web is going to grow in non- English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these 'new' users. I think it is a pity there are so few translations of important documents and essays published on the web - from English into other languages and vice versa. (…) In the same way, the recent spreading of the internet in new regions raises questions which would be good to read about. When will Spanish- speaking communication theorists and those speaking other languages be translated?"
Marcel Grangier is the head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services, which means he is in charge of organizing translations into French for the Swiss government. He wrote in January 1999: "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking English, etc.). The answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best possible circumstances, we still need to develop tools to improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only one example of what can be done."
2001: COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT AND CREATIVE COMMONS
= [Overview]
Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008. Science Commons was founded in 2005 to "design strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web- enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007 as "a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources."
= Copyright on the web
What did people think about copyright on the web, when there were heated debated about print articles and other copyrighted works being posted and re-posted without the consent of their authors? Here are some answers.
Based in San Francisco, California, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist in information technology and a "facilitator" between the United States and Europe. He wrote in July 1999: "Copyright in its traditional context doesn't exist any more. Authors have to get used to a new situation: the total freedom of the flow of information. The original content is like a fingerprint: it can't be copied. So it will survive and flourish."
Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference website about Haitian culture. He wrote in November 1999: "The debate will continue forever, as information becomes more conspicuous than the air that we breathe and more fluid than water. (…) Authors will have to become a lot more creative in terms of how to control the dissemination of their work and profit from it. The best that we can do right now is to promote basic standards of professionalism, and insist at the very least that the source and authorship of any work be duly acknowledged. Technology will have to evolve to support the authorization process."
Alain Bron is a consultant in information systems and a novelist. He wrote in November 1999: "I regard the web today as a public domain. That means in practice the notion of copyright on it disappears: everyone can copy everyone else. Anything original risks being copied at once if copyrights are not formally registered or if works are available without payment facilities. A solution is to make people pay for information, but this is no watertight guarantee against it being copied."