is offering more and
more things for free. Authors don't have to accept that, but a growing number of
them are choosing to adapt to it and are benefitting. The business models on the
Web are changing very rapidly and will continue to. New ones will spring up with
a strong free-of-charge content, but copyright will have to be respected in
newer and more original ways by authors and providers of services and content.

Cynthia Delisle: Ideally, copyright should be respected on the Web as it is in
other media such as the radio and the written press. However, the Internet
raises new kinds of problems here because of the ease that data can be
(re)produced and (re)distributed on a huge scale and because of the tradition of
it being available for free. This tradition means people balk at paying for
products and services they'd find it quite normal to pay for in other situations
and they also perhaps have fewer qualms, in the context of the Net, about using
pirated products. I think respecting copyright is one of the biggest issues for
the future of the Net and it'll certainly be very interesting to see what
solutions will emerge to deal with it.

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

Guy Bertrand: Worldwide e-commerce has grown enormously since 1998 and
businesses are increasingly keen to use the languages of their potential
customers, which is going to boost further this multilingual aspect. E-commerce
won't take over the Web, but its importance is growing as multilingualism
increases there. But the tools for multilingualism on the Web are unfortunately
always one step behind.

Cynthia Delisle: I think the trend which had already begin in 1998 has now
established itself and the future of the Internet is definitely going to be a
multilingual one. The Net is becoming more international and it's hard to see
how this can happen without it becoming linguistically and culturally more
diverse. English will probably always be the Net's most frequently-used
language, but the proportion of sites and pages available in other languages
will steadily increase until a certain equilibrium is reached. I also quite
agree with Mr Bertrand when he points out that the tools to handle this
linguistic diversity are not yet ready. Machine translation, for example, has
made woefully little headway in recent years. Yet the needs are growing all the
time, which is why we need to step up research and development in these areas.

= What i