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Re: Copyrighting/Patenting a Conlang

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Monday, April 26, 2004, 3:00
John Cowan wrote:

> That is a different situation. In the U.S., a parody of a work is > considered a "fair use" of that work, and is an exception to the exclusive > rights of the copyright owner. The reasoning here is that owners are > unlikely to license their works for the purpose of parody. The decisive > case was the 2 Live Crue parody of Ray Orbison's "Pretty Woman". > This rule does not apply in other countries, most of which have a > narrower definition of "fair use", covering only things like brief > quotations for review or scholarship.
Would fair use include things like brief quotations for the purpose of illustrating some grammatical point of a conlang? I haven't really given much thought to that sort of thing in the past, but I know that I've used things like a line from a song or a movie as translation exercises. I can't imagine that quoting and translating single sentences or brief phrases would be a problem, but then I couldn't have imagined that such a thing as software patents could be legal a few years ago.

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John Cowan <cowan@...>