Re: Copyrighting/Patenting a Conlang

From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>

> What's a given is that you've got copyright on all and any actual texts
you
> write in or of your conlangs; the debate is about whether and to what
extent
> it's acceptable to extract linguistic information therefrom and compile
lexica
> and the like.
Somewhat along those lines, I've been wondering myself if it would be
copyright infringement (or at least a legal form of theft of intellectual
property if not) to use a reconstructed protolanguage as a basis for a
conlang, such as Pokorny's Indo-European. I'm asking because I'm using the
Bomhard-Kerns Nostratic work *a lot* for Tech, and the CJK data for Big Six
will be taken from the Unihan database (part of Unicode), among other
things.

It's not the same as deriving a conlang of my own from one of Tolkien's, but
still I'm asking. Whatever the case, if I ever publish fantasy/sci-fi work
involving Techians, there will definitely be a mention of any and all
sources in the Appendix on the Tech language.