Re: Copyrighting/Patenting a Conlang

En réponse à J. K. Hoffman :


>As for the other bit, I'm not sure that a translation would count, would
>it?  How does it work with, say, a natlang?
Simple: a translation of a text is a copy. If you want to distribute it, 
you need to ask permission of the copyright holder of the original 
(usually, but not always, the author). If you make the translation for 
private use, you needn't ask anyone about it. Copyright is only about 
distributed works.

>My thoughts on this centered around three examples with conlangs.
>First, the vampiric language in _Blade_ and the sequel.  How were they
>protected?
Since AFAIK the vampiric language of Blade was a true language, I doubt it 
was protected by anything.

>   Same thing for Klingon...
IIRC, The Klingon dictionary is trademarked, i.e. each word is owned by the 
author of the language. But whether the Klingon grammar can be in anyway 
protected...

However, this discussion is close to the current discussion in the IT world 
about software patents (especially since software patents amount to idea 
patents, to which grammars would belong it seems). Just google for 
"software patents" for many discussions about them and why patents on ideas 
are a Bad Thing(TM). I basically agree with the anti-software patents here, 
so I also agree that patents on grammatical notions would be a bad thing. 
In any case, prior art would probably exist for any grammatical notion you 
could come up with, so such patents would be invalid anyway.

IP (Intellectual Property), an umbrella term that has been used for a while 
now by people trying to muddy the water and pretend that ideas can be 
"owned" like objects, exists in three forms and three forms only:
- Copyrights: anything you write is yours, and yours only. If anyone wants 
to copy and distribute your works (and that includes distributing a 
translation), they need your permission (licence).
- Trademarks: used to protect a product's name against the competition. A 
muddy subject as the rules for what is trademarkable aren't clear (common 
words aren't trademarkable, but as the latest Amsterdam ruling of Microsoft 
vs. Lindows shows, what if the trademark is a common word in another 
language than the official language in the country of the trial? Is that a 
valid trademark or not?). Anyway, you could always protect your language by 
trademarking its name, so that nobody can take that name and create another 
language named the same.
- Patents: basically patents are meant to help spreading information, 
giving time-limited monopoly on an original material (there are 
restrictions on what can be patented: simply put, you can only patent 
something truly original - the "no prior art" argument -, something which 
is not based on simply using the laws of physics with little innovation - 
you cannot patent a new shape of catapult -, and something which is *not* 
the only way to implement a certain action - a patent mustn't lead to an 
absolute monolopy. There *must* be possible alternatives, although they 
needn't have been developed yet -. The last part is also a big argument 
against software patents - which amount to the possibility of patenting 
scrollbars, or even actions like "click on the icon to start a program".) 
invention to its creator, provided the creator publishes the whereabouts of 
the invention. This way, the inventor can use their invention and make 
money out of it without fear that a big company would steal it, at least 
long enough for the inventor to repay the investment they put in the 
development of the invention, and yet the invention's description is 
available for all, adding to the common knowledge, and after a certain 
amount of years, the invention falls into public domain. Everyone's happy.

A fourth form of IP (hehe, it's like the Three Musketeers, there are four 
of them ;)) ) does exist, but has no legal existence as such: it's trade 
secrets. Basically, the recipe of Coca-Cola is a trade secret. The idea is 
that you can protect something by simply refusing to show it to anyone. 
It's a risky business: if somebody steals your trade secret and shows it to 
the world, you can sue the one who did that (stealing is stealing), but 
once everybody has seen it, you've lost your competitive edge. And since it 
was secret you couldn't patent it, so you cannot prevent anyone from using it.

So this was a crash course in the various forms of intellectual property. 
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), so I may have been incorrect in some things, but 
in general what I wrote is correct.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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