Trademark & copyright related to conlangs (was death of Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan)

bjm10@CORNELL.EDU comunu:

> Short phrases, names, and words are not covered by copyright law, never
> have been, never shall be.  I take it there were no actual intellectual
> property lawyers working on this project.
But they are covered by trademark law.  The Lojbanistis lucked out that the
term "loglan" was seen applying to the category;  even though the term was
very generic, I could see it being a legitimate trademark if Brown had
followed the right steps.  Many trademarks are pretty close to generic:
Windows for a GUI, WinSurvey and Survey Pro for a survey program.  I once
read that trademarks had five levels, where level 1 was in fact generic and
level 5 was abstract (relating Apple to computers, for instance).

Nintendo has trademarked all the words in their Pokemon naming language,
being the names of the individual Pokemon monsters:  Riachu, Picachu,
Charmander, Charizard, etc.  That provides a strong protection.  But
trademark law relates to categories.  It would be totally possible to
trademark all those names for names of beer, for instance, since that is a
completely different category.  For instance, my real job is writing
SurveySolutions web-survey research software (probably a Level II
trademark), for which we have a trademark;  there's SurveySolutions software
consulting service trademarked by another company, with the Trademark Office
ruling those were two different categories;  there's a SurveySolutions
company specializing in land surveying.  Or take Perseus, the name of our
company;  it's also the name of a publisher, a venture capitalist, an
educational project (Greek literature), a bespoke consultancy in England,
and more and more.

So if you want to protect your word list, you would need to trademark and
would need to relate it to a product.  Each Pokemon monster is also a
specific toy.  I don't think you could trademark each Klingon word unless
there were products associated with those words;  the words are not
themselves products.

IANAL(AIAWS).

Best regards,

Jeffrey Henning
http://www.LangMaker.com/ - Invent Your Own Language
http://www.Jeffrey.Henning.com/
"If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed....  Oh, wait, he
does!"