e-mail : Stephane.Cottin@wanadoo.fr

Before talking about Internet and its effects on French legal bibliography, it is important to notice that French legal resources on Internet are very rare. An Australian lawyer, Peter Faris, holds a pretty comprehensive list of all French legal sources available on the net : from this list we can say that, if something does exist, no rationality seems to lead this list. For example, only 20 of the 7500 statutes ("lois"), only 15 of the more than 70 Codes are present. Moreover, except for two kind of cases, everything is published on private sites.

This situation must be clarified. French law does exist on line, thanks to a permanent public effort, but not on Internet. For French Administration, "on line" means "Minitel" and the videotext option, lead since 1981 with a real domestic success.

A decree of 31^st may 1996 regulates electronic access (including Internet, but without citing it) to public databases. It organizes a monopoly for only one Administration (the direction of the Official Gazettes - "Direction des Journaux Officiels - DJO"). This "direction" produces all the databases, which are broadcast by only one private operator, chosen for three years (actually ORT, via its branch "Européennes de Données").

But for the moment, nothing from this public databank is available on Internet. And since the decree forbids to every other public administration (even if it directly produces something) to broadcast public legal data. Actually, the section I of the decree describes exactly what are public legal data : in summary every caselaw, every laws and acts of the regulatory powers (data from the parliamentary assemblies are not concerned, that explains why there are pretty good websites for both French assemblies).

1. History of legal Internet in France begins in 1995 with a semi-private experiment : Adminet. A civil servant of the French Ministry of Industry, Christian Scherer, made an Internet database about the French Administration on a computer of the "Ecole des Mines de Paris" (where some parts of the search engine of Altavista have been built). First rather confidential and discrete, this site became famous when its creator decided to put on it the Official Gazette (at least its table of contents). That made the authorities very angry, and allowed the problem to be discovered and discussed by the newspapers.

After Adminet, numerous private websites have been built, essentially from student's homepages or law professional Internet-addicted. Some are remarkable, and each one makes hyper-links toward the others.

2. For the public sector, the principle of monopoly has been breached in two times. First, some public administrations seem to disobey the decree of '96. For example, Ministry of Finance put on its website two codes, Constitutional Council puts its caselaws, Ministry of telecommunications gives some laws and regulations… Secondly, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin breaks definitely the principle saying in a speech in august '97 "essential public data must be freely on Internet". He gave immediately the example of the Official Gazette, which had opened its website (http://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr) on 14^th July 1997, but just offers only the summary in HTML, and the first part of the journal in image mode.
3. A commission is now to give the comprehensive definition of "essential public data" to be put on the Net before '98. This will be only at this time that we can really say Internet would change something in French legal bibliography ! Since no "official" French legal data are yet present on Internet, no reflection could be lead on the (very important) issues described in the questions of the paragraph A..

1. Standardisation of modes of citation to documents on the Internet (including problems of lack of pagination)
2. Dealing with the ephemeral nature of material on the Internet : documents can be here today, and gone or altered tomorrow.
3. Technical issues of dealing with the fact that, while the quantity legal materials on the Internet is growing rapidly, most of these materials are being posted without any searching capability.
4. Dealing with the multiplicity of search systems used at those Internet law sites that do have such capability. How for instance, do you find all cases dealing with the question of product liability for defective diving boards ?
5. Are court rules and legal periodical rules on citations favourable to citations to Internet sources, or do they require citations to hard copy sources ?
6. Availability of translations of material.
7. Evolution of publishing on the Internet, including possible or likely future developments.

But on my personal experience, I can say that I expect a real earthquake. Judges have already taken some caselaws concerning Internet, and a lot of articles have been written on them. Already some very important cases have been resolved with the help of researches on Internet (in comparative law for example), but the sources had never been exactly mentioned. Another proof of the interest in this question comes from the number of citations of the word "Internet" in the Doctrinal CD-ROM database :

1. Mixed Bibliographical and Intellectual Property

1. Is there copyright in public documents ? -
2. Is there intellectual property protection for the method normally used to cite cases or other legal material, such as citations to proprietary sets of law reports ?

Concerning paragraphs B and C. of the questionnaire, and the purely intellectual property issues, the problems is not really where we can expect it. Since French Administration built a legal monopoly on public data, the notion of intellectual property does not have anymore sense, because it can not have any property, but for the owner of the monopoly.

This situation must (and can) be explained. This method was totally justified when it has been hold, in 1984, at the age of the Minitel. The administrative authorities wanted to impose to themselves and to private data producers some levels of quality : the data had to be relevant, fast available and comprehensive. It is obvious that these three qualities could not be reached if the market is not protected : to put verified data on line has a cost that can not be balanced by the benefits.

But, with Internet, problems are totally different, even if the data must offer the same qualities than before. Actually, techniques and mentalities have changed, audience(s) has(ve) changed : domestic audience wants always quality but cheaper / foreign audience could be reached and waits something !

The debate is running, and the speech of the Prime Minister has been quite a surprise for everybody.

1. Purely Intellectual Property Issues

1. Berne 'pluses' in the TRIPs Agreement, and their impact on national laws, in particular the specified protection of compilation (Article 10), the right of distribution (Article 6) and the extension of the right of communication to the public (Article 8).
2. The WIPO Copyright Treaty and any further initiative from WIPO on the protection of databases. This only needs to be dealt with by one person, and I am happy to do it.
3. The protection of the databases in the national jurisdiction.

The Court of Cassation (the higher court of the judiciary branch) recognized copyrights on databanks, but reserved some rights to quote. In French, you can read at http://www.adbs.fr/adbs/proderv/jetude/html/prod1806.htm the proceedings of a seminar on public data on Internet : "The information of the public domain at the time of Internet" and especially the article of Maurice Ronai : "Public information : access and diffusion".

For the question of copyright, Hervé Le Crosnier gave us at the same seminar an excellent paper on "the economy of the information in the context of the new technologies".