Re: Conlang legal protection (WAS: Conlang music)

Trademark and Copyright are quite different things.

For one thing, copyright is automatic when a creative
work is put into tangible form, while trademarks
generally require paying substantial fees to the
government agency which registers such things. I
doubt anyone would want to pay the fees required
to trademark all the words in a language.

 --Ph. D.


David J. Peterson writes:
>
> I don't know if this is relevant, but back when the Chicago Bulls
> were making their first championship run, the term "three-peat"
> was coined.  If I remember right, Pat Riley apparently used it
> first, and tried to copyright it (or did?), and tried to get royalties
> from Chicago Bulls "three-peat" merchandise.  Ah, it is true.
> There's an interesting discussion/summary here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-peat
>
> So, in fact, Pat Riley did coin a word--a neologism--and now
> apparently collects royalties *any time* that word is used on
> merchandise (he trademarked it).  If this happened, just what
> prevents a language creator from coining every single word
> in their dictionary?
>
> Oh, and what if two conlangers decided to do this, and I, say,
> coined "mata" as "see", and someone else with an entirely
> different language but similar phoneme inventory decided
> to trademark "mata" as "cat"?
>
> -David
> *******************************************************************
> "sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
> "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
>
> -Jim Morrison