From: JFC Morfin (jefsey@jefsey.com)
Date: Thu Jul 27 2006 - 15:58:38 CDT
At 12:17 26/07/2006, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>From: "Stephane Bortzmeyer" <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>
> > On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 12:40:26AM +0200,
> > JFC Morfin <jefsey@jefsey.com> wrote
> > a message of 28 lines which said:
> >
> >> What is fun is that this is the law. Products sold in France to
> >> French consumers must be documented and work in French. This does
> >> not affect famous trade marks which mostly use international
> >> scripts.
> >
> > No one was ridiculous enough to require that all URLs advertised in
> > France be written in correct French, with accents :-)
> >
> > Even the Académie Française did not (yet?) sue the ".fr" registry for
> > forcing them to use http://www.academie-francaise.fr/ :-)
>
>That's wrong. What the law requires is that the product must be sold
>with a usage guide in French for its main functions (it is not
>required to explain all in French, and the translation may be summary).
Philippe,
you are correct here. Stephane is just pulling my leg and tries to
know if I will advise the Académie Française to sue AFNIC :-). Or if
".fra" will support IDNs. Anyway, I suppose l'Académie will sue no
one, or it would have to sue so many ones for wrong spelling!
The issue is more complex. There a few different cases where the
Internet violates the French law which are in legal limbo due to
(sometimes deliberate) lack of legal action by the State. One was for
years the very status of AFNIC (.FR registry). A law (LCEN) was
therefore voted to address that situation. However, we still wait for
the application decrees: they should permit to clarify some issues
and responsibilities. Others can certainly be acted as you document
it. Others are strategically planned.
Anyway the .FR registry is not concerned here: their site is in
correct French and they are not responsible if the product they sell
is in "0-Z". Stephane's remark has nothing to do with Unicode.
My mail refered to cases the French law is established for (other
countries have the similar approaches to address an e-globalization
problem Linglish countries ignore). Let assume that someone registers
"arrete.com" and uses it in an application where the user may be
confused understanding either it as "stop!" or "stopped" due to the
lack of accent. If the consequence is détrimental to the user, the
user will win.
jfc
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