Re: Copyrighting/Patenting a Conlang

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> 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.
Technically, a translation in the U.S. cannot be made even for purely
private use, because it is a derivative work, and the making (not merely
the distributing or displaying) of a derivative work is protected by
the copyright.  In practice, of course, there is no particular way
for the copyright owner to even know that such a private translation exists.

The five exclusive rights of a copyright owner are:

	1) to copy the work
	2) to distribute the work
	3) to publicly display the work
	4) to publicly perform the work
	5) to create derivative works

> 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...
The name "Klingon" is trademarked; a trademark must actually be used in
trade, in this case to sell the dictionary and various other things.
The words of Klingon are not trademarked, and probably cannot be
copyrighted either, at least in the U.S.

> I also agree that patents on grammatical notions would
> be a bad thing.
So do I, but that doesn't mean they won't happen.  The U.S. patent
commissioner has gone on record to the effect that a legal argument
used in court could be patented by the law firm, provided it was
sufficiently novel (not very) and useful (no, you don't have to win).

> 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.
Not unless the language is used in commerce somehow.  The inventor of
Loglan tried to trademark it as a name for grammars and dictionaries
(not as a language per se), but the USPTO ruled that it was a generic
name for logical languages generally.

> [S]imply 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 -.
Patent law is country-specific: these things may be true in France or the
EU, but are definitely not true in the U.S.  New shapes of industrial widgets
are patented all the time.

> 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.
In the U.S. you can collect the entire damages from whoever revealed the
secret (provided they have it, of course).

> So this was a crash course in the various forms of intellectual property.
> IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer)
IANAL, TINLA (this is not legal advice).

--
John Cowan                                   jcowan@reutershealth.com
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know

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