domain. (Mary Bono mentioned
this wish of his in Congress last year.)

If media companies are seen to try to lock up everything that they can get away
with, I don't find it surprising that some consumers react by putting on-line
anything *they* can get away with. Unfortunately, doing that in turn takes away
the legitimate rights of authors.

How to practically solve this? Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality,
and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate
interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance
of principles, rather than as the power play it's too often ends up being ("big
money vs. rogue pirates") we may be able to come up with some reasonable
accommodations.

CAOIMHIN O DONNAILE (Island of Skye, Scotland)

#Maintains European Minority Languages on the main site with information on
Scottish Gaelic

Maintained on the site of the college Sabhal Mor Ostaig by Caoimhin P. O
Donnaile, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by
alphabetic order and by language family.

*Interview of August 18, 1998

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

I see four main points:

- The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of
English as a world language.

- The Internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by
itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in
itself.

- The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big
demand for this.

- The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will
greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual.

*Interview of January 15, 2000

= What exactly do you do professionally?

I teach computing (through the Gaelic language) at a college on the island of
Skye in Scotland. I maintain the college website, which is the main site
worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

I haven't been following the debate, but I think the duration of copyright is
far too long. Other than that I think that copyright should be respected in
general.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

There is a danger that English will take over the world because of the spread of
the Internet. However, if people are keen to maintain other languages, then the
Internet will help with this.