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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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