Re: Loxian

John Cowan, who used to frequent this list and is gone, alas, and who has
worked on Lojban for long years, and who remembers the incendiary quarrels
about Loglang and whether it could be copyrighted, has expressed
emphatically that invented languages cannot be.

As for the other post: I'm not even sure you can copyright the name of your
language.  You might put the copyright sign after it, or TradeMark, but that
doesn't protect you legally, largely because I don't think the Internet is
considered as a protectable venue.  Someone please correct me, because it's
a depressing idea.

To wit: I was approached by a RolePlaying group and asked if they could
borrow "Teonaht" for their "dwarves."  I politely requested that they not.
I don't know if they did; if they asked permission logic dictates that they
respect permission.  But we conlangers don't have something like the Writers
Guild of America, where if you write a script for a television show, you can
register said script with the WGA, and make it impossible for the producers
to borrow as much as a sentence, or your title, without acknowledging you.
However, they are completely free to use your idea, and couch it in
different words.  This happened with my teleplay "Babel," which, had I not
arbitrated, would have denied me any TV screen credit by Paramount.  And the
residuals.

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html


----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Bates" <chris.maths_student@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2006 11:54 AM
Subject: Re: Loxian


> >Good points, but I suspet you can copyright the book, word list,
> >dictionary
>>and music that it comes in, so .. And people are into Official vs
>>UnOfficial, so ..
>>
>>Mike
>>
> The issue is not whether you can copyright the grammar, word list,
> dictionary etc, but whether people can freely use the language. And I
> would say they can: they might not be able to copy word for word large
> chunks of your grammar or dictionary, but I don't think that copyrighting
> these materials is enough to stop them actually writing in your language
> without your permission. Of course, copyright has been spreading in recent
> years, but I still don't think you can copyright or legally own a
> language, whether a conlang or a natlang. The best you can do is own the
> copyright to the grammar and dictionary (and thus legally control their
> distribution), but I don't think if someone has already legally read these
> materials (for instance by reading your website) that you can stop them
> using that knowledge to write in the language.
> Copyright protects the exact form of particular written works, not their
> content per se. Isaac Newton, for instance, had he written the Principia
> recently, would possess copyright over his Principia and could stop people
> copying his work word for work, but he would *not* possess copyright over
> the Newtonian physics contained within his book. If copyright law didn't
> work like this then there would have been no progress in the sciences for
> a long long time, because everyone would have to ask permission from the
> first person to publish an idea to use it.
>