Re: this is what I got in the mail.

En réponse à John Cowan <cowan@...>:

>
> It would not; there is no copyright in words, and following
> grammatical
> rules doesn't make your work a derivative of the grammar.  Do you
> think
> that every C program ever written is a derivative of Kernighan and
> Ritchie's
> book?
>
True, but isn't C copyrighted in the sense that it is not allowed to modify the
language itself without approval of the authors? Just like the TeX source (and
thus the TeX language) is copyrighted in the sense that it is forbidden to
modify it and publish the modification under the name TeX (and this is a pretty
permissive copyright, I think the copyright on C is much stricter). In this
sense, conlangs could also be copyrighted. For Teonaht, it has a setting,
speakers (if fictional ones), and wanting to use it for another fictional race,
renaming it "Dwarvish" and God knows what other modifications, looks to me like
a breach of this kind of copyright. It's not a copyright that prevents
individual works *in the language*. It's a copyright that prevents the use of
the language *as a whole* against the author's wishes. I think there is a
strong distinction here that should be taken into account. That group of RPGers
didn't want to write individual works in Teonaht, they wanted to take over the
language for their race of Dwarves. I see those actions as quite different from
each other. It boils down to "fair use" to me.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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