Re: death of Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan

At 04:49 PM 02/16/2000 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Matt Pearson wrote:
>
> > For the uninitiated and midly curious:  What, in a nutshell, are the
> > differences of opinion between the Loglanists and the Lojbanists?
>
>Probably fewer and fewer.
>
>The original difference was about the public or proprietary
>status of Loglan: the proto-Lojbanists wanted a language whose
>word lists, production rules, and so on were in the public domain.
>At that time, the official Loglan position was that everything
>was copyright, even the individual words, and that nothing could
>be published in (not about, *in*) the language without official
>permission.
Specifically, the original dispute was that JCB said that Nora and I could
not include the TLI word list in our Shareware distribution of her flash
card program without acknowledging copyright and paying a royalty on each
copy given out (he had no concept of Shareware).  He also disapproved of my
working on doing anything to promote Loglan without his prior approval,
partly because he was distrustful of potential rivals, and partly because
he wanted me to not dilute my Loglan efforts by working on anything other
than the task I had volunteered for (negative translation: jealous control
freak; positive translation: traditional project manager; he viewed me and
other volunteers as employees when we were working on the language).

When I failed to concede, and started teaching a local Loglan class to
people, he refused to sell me dictionaries for the students, and one of the
students suggested that we should just make a new work list so we could
avoid his copyright claims.  A few weeks later, me and 3 other Loglanists
started to do just that.  Then as we started producing what we called
"Loglan-88", JCB started his trademark claims, registering a new trademark
and having a lawyer send me a threatening letter, whereupon we sued the
Patent Office to cancel the trademark.

(Per someone's later comment, wordlists can under certain circumstances be
copyrighted.  In this case however, since it was a complete set of words
and there was a canonical definition, we had a legitimate counter to this
claim if we wanted to pursue it in court.  But at that point we were
avoiding a lawyers - Lojban started out as much a "statement" for
negotiating purposes to show how ridiculous and
potentially  self-destructive his claims were, as an actual intent to make
a new version of Loglan (and there was never a thought of making a totally
new conlang).

Meanwhile he had similarly invoked copyright claims against Jeff Prothero
who had done much of the YACC grammar work, claiming that Jeff had done
this work as an employee; Jeff countered that he had done the work for free
on his own, and as a student at University of Washington using their
facilities and therefore his work could not be considered proprietary
without UW's.  While the claims were pending we decided to redevelop the
grammar from scratch to ensure that there was no legal issue.

>To evade the arguments, the words were redesigned from scratch
>in 1998,
1987

>and the production rules rebuilt.  Lojban is the
>descendant of that effort.  Since then, the groups have
>not interacted very much, so further drift has occurred, but
>relatively little.  For the most part, the languages remain
>mutual relexes of each other, though some words have changed their
>lexical semantics.  A bit of behind-the-scenes consultation has
>led to some joint solutions to common language-design problems.
Because Lojban has been more heavily used pretty much ever since the word
list and grammar were completed, we discovered problems in expression and
translation that needed solution and solved them.  TLI had almost no usage,
and has tended to "discover" problems from 1 to 5 years after we solved
them, and has almost always chosen a solution that was exactly the same as
ours.  This was not actually behind the scenes consultation, but rather
that various people looked to Lojban to see where the problems were, and
our solutions, and sold them to JCB while politickly not mentioning where
the ideas came from.

Even so, Lojban added many features that TLI Loglan never added, so Lojban
is a relex and a superset of TLI Loglan.  (Differences in semantics of
individual words is not a problem, since Lojban could define compound words
that exactly match the TLI semantics.)

>Litigation settled that the word "Loglan" is not a valid U.S.
>trademark, and may be applied to Lojban or anything else.
>Lojbanists claim to be part of the Loglan Project and use
>the term "Loglan" generically, whereas Loglanists typically
>exclude Lojban from the term "Loglan".  Many persons support
>both efforts.
As John noted in expansion, the word was found to be merely descriptive as
an abbreviation.  More importantly, it was also found to have been used by
the community to refer to the language itself and not to the products being
sold under the trademark, and THAT is what made it generic.  The language
itself was never treated as marketable goods (unlike some computer languages).

>Since then the copyright issue has receded, as the official
>Loglanists have adopted a relaxed attitude.  We now refer to
>each other's web sites and so on.
And indeed, much of the TLI material is now available as Shareware via
their web site.  But their dictionary/word list and their formal grammar
are still so far as I know, not freely available.

>Also, Lojban has a better reference grammar.  :-)
Someone posted the URL, and a link to amazon.com.  Note that you can buy it
directly from us for somewhat cheaper than from amazon.com, though we don't
have online credit card service and you have to phone or snail mail a card
number to me (or send money).

Note that the selling of lots of copies of this book will mean all the
sooner that we have the money to publish the other planned books
(dictionary, textbook, introduction, chrestomathy/readings, etc.)

BTW, since I don't think it has been mentioned, the official Lojban website
at www.lojban.org was recently updated and now has another 25 Meg or so of
material, including an updated FAQ and project list, lots of language
texts, wordlists, software and all issues of our journal Ju'i Lobypli.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)