Watchdogs lose French court battle to ban English on Web site

Georgia Tech Lorraine, the European platform of the Georgia Institute of Technology, this week won a court case after two French watchdog bodies filed a suit alleging it had violated French law by using English on its Web pages.

"It would have been very serious if we had lost. It's not just us who would have moved site - it would have led to a massive exodus," said Hans B. Puttgen, director of the institute in Metz, northeastern France.

It was the first time that the two groups, Defense de la langue Francaise and Avenir de la langue Francaise, had attempted to apply the 1994 loi Toubon, named after former culture minister Jacques Toubon, to the Internet and to a higher education institution.

"The case was an important one, with the potential to impact every Web page in the world," said Georgia Tech president Wayne Clough. The court ruled that a wrong procedure had been used to file the suit.

The Loi Toubon forbids the sale or advertising of goods and services in France in any other language than French. It reinforced previous legislation protecting the French language but restricted the procedures for alleging violations.

The watchdogs had simply printed out the Web pages as proof but failed to call on the public prosecutor to investigate.

Georgia Tech Lorraine's legal case was that the law contains specific exemptions for educational institutions using a foreign language and foreign faculty staff. Translation of every Web page is not feasible, it argued, because navigating the Internet involves using hypertext links and users may move invisibly from a server located in France to one in another country.