Re: Copyrighting/Patenting a Conlang

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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