Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: At the end of this week it will prove difficult to move around France without stumbling onto something Internet-related. Schools in Paris and rural villages will offer Web tutorials to parents and alumni. Artists will create interactive works. Politicians have scheduled online chats with their constituencies. "Net-vans" will roam the streets. Companies will hand out connection software packages for pennies. Mesdames et messieurs, next Friday, March 20, and Saturday, March 21, will be "la F�te de l'Internet" � a national Internet celebration by the European country most skeptical and doubtful of this "new form of American colonialism," as one of its ministers said last year. There is no paradox. France's diatribes against the global network and the threat it poses to French language and culture are rapidly dissolving. With nearly 1.5 million people subscribing to an Internet service provider or accessing the Web from the office, usage figures are up 100 percent from last year. Magazines are starting to put high-tech hipsters on their cover. Deep-pocket investors are pouring millions into infrastructure, content and marketing. "Until a few months ago, bringing up the Internet in official circles would have been considered anti-patriotic," Bruno Oudet, the president of the French branch of the Internet Society (ISOC) and one of the people behind the festival, said in an interview. "Now, even low-tech president Jacques Chirac will speak to the nation over the Internet," Oudet added. Chirac reached fame among Internet users about one year ago. During a visit to a library, he fingered a computer mouse and asked his aides what it was, immediately becoming a global icon of political backwardness. During the course of the festival, a one-minute videotaped speech by Chirac (in RealVideo format) will be posted on the presidential Web site, the site's webmaster, Xavier Schallenbaum, confirmed. "It will be an optimistic speech, about imagination, progress and new jobs," Schallenbaum added. The same day all the employees of the presidential office, from the chief of staff to the clerks, will attend a mandatory crash course on Internet basics. According to Oudet, the turning point can be traced back to last August, when Lionel Jospin, the socialist Prime Minister, in a speech endorsed the Internet as a crucial business and cultural tool for a "responsible information society." Jospin pledged more than 1 billion French francs (about $165 million) to wire schools, train teachers, support innovative companies, ease the contact between citizens and the administration, and help make newspapers, books and artworks accessible on the Internet. "We started tinkering about a national event to leverage the momentum created by Jospin's talk and popularize the Internet," Oudet explained. Other organizations soon joined the Internet Society and mapped out a festival "with an Internet-like structure: open to everybody and decentralized," he added. A small Paris-based team working on a budget of 300,000 francs ($50,000) is coordinating the 500-plus local and national initiatives. "This goes from Internet users posting flyers on their apartment doors to invite their neighbours to step in and give Web navigation a try, to large retail chains preparing special animations and sales," explained Odile Plisson, who is in charge of communication for the festival committee. Other events range from special televised shows scheduled by at least three national broadcasters and rural initiatives aimed at bringing the Internet to farmers, to hundreds of tutorials and several Web-design prizes. Movie theaters in cities such as Saint-Omer in the northern part of the country will show only Internet-related movies. Social institutions will give out e-mail accounts for free. Artists will create "digital paintings" and display them online. Musicians will play in front of webcams. Software designers will show (and sell) their products everywhere from department stores to street markets. French language organizations will bring together people in dozens of francophone countries to chat online. Fred Forest, an artist known on the Internet for having been the first to sell an online artwork in 1996, is planning to "stop the time" for 24 hours. Using Web cameras installed all over the globe, he will stage a show in a Paris subway station. Every hour, the live video pictures will come in from a different time zone, westbound � keeping the clock virtually still. France Loisirs, a French book club, has enrolled Yann Qu�ffelec, a celebrated writer who was awarded the Goncourt prize in 1985, to start an interactive novel. "He has written the first chapter of the novel, which will be posted on our Web site on March 20," explains France Loisir's head of Internet operations, Christophe Leon. "Everyone will be able to submit a sequel." Qu�ffelec will then pen the conclusion and edit the whole, and France Loisir will publish it as a book. A similar experience proved very popular last year when online bookstore Amazon.com carried it out with the author John Updike. Another initiative that is likely to draw a lot of attention is the Internet trial. For two days in the real Court of Justice of Paris, real lawyers, prosecutors, judges, jurors and clerks will be the actors of a simulated criminal proceeding against "The Internet." Dozens of accusing and defending witnesses and experts will be called upon to testify on charges of social exclusion, illegal and harmful content, and privacy invasion. A young handcuffed actress dressed with specially designed "cyber-clothes" will play the defendant's role. Staged by the Internet Society, the National School of Magistrates and the Paris' Lawyers Union, the trial "is not intended as an attack of the Internet, but rather to shed light on it and defend it," organizer France Miremont explained. "The Internet has been both magnified and vilified," she said. "We'll try to avoid both the paranoic critics and the optimistic hype and address the issue through facts." "And who better than a judge to weigh facts?" she added. "This will be quite a bit of fun," ISOC's Oudet said. "The lawyers and prosecutors have been preparing their cases for weeks now." Will the F�te de l'Internet also be the funeral of the Minitel, France's popular online service? "I think we have crossed the border between a centralized information society and a decentralized one," Oudet answered. "Yet there is still a long way to go." -- May the leprechauns be near you to spread luck along your way. And may all the Irish angels smile upon you this St. Patrick's Day. Subscribe/Unsubscribe, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the body of the message enter: subscribe/unsubscribe law-issues
