Re: Loxian

This was rejected yesterday, since I was over quota.  So it weirdly follows
my comment on Loxian that I posted just now.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2006 12:57 PM



> 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.
Except languages that appear in CDs by Famous Singers, apparently.  I wonder
if this is also true of the Magma group.  What about "Sanomi"-- printed on
the Internet?  What happens when you print something on the Internet?

> 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.
>>
>

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