Re: Linguistic copyright (RE: this is what I got in the mail.)

I'm not a lawyer. I know nothing about copyright laws in general and U.S. ones
in particular. But I'm sure a kind of protection can be applied to conlangs
anyway. SidheMaiden mentioned a legal response re Tolkien's languages, and the
guys there were satisfied because they *wanted to use* it. If we want to *set
limits* to usage, I'm sure there must be ways to do it.
At least those are the facts:
1. Some conlangs *are* copyrighted. According to the Klingon Language Institute
site (www.kli.org), thlingan Hol is, and rights on it belong to Paramount.
Somebody mentioned not long ago that Láadan is.
2. When I visited several sites about Native American languages, I saw there a
warning that all linguistic material mentioned on the site, is a part of
cultural heritage of a certain nation and therefore may not be used in
culturally alien contexts like choosing a Native name, simulating Native talk
in novels, producing spells etc. I don't remember exact expressions, I'll try
to find this info tomorrow in my office comp, im yirtze Hashem.
3. Esperanto was realizing "controlled evolution" long before all those
copyright things, and succeeded.

IMNVHO, anyone may use any conlang freely, but only shawing respect to its
primary concultural aspect. That is, if a guy wants to right an original story
in Hooba [1], to translate the Quran into Hooba, or to write a story in English
about the life of Hooba tribe in Barizonian jungles and a couple of personages
will talk dialogues in Hooba, that's all right. But if a guy wants to take my
Hooba, call it Perduc and say that green two-tailed aliens from Aldebaran talk
it, I'm gonna tear him into small pieces even without any copyright laws.

[1] Hooba is a fictional name for a random conlang.

Yitzik the Angry Snakie

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