Re: Interesting article about conlangs and the law

On 9/13/07, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:
> http://www.suburbandestiny.com/?p=240
>
> Some factual errors though, it is claimed:
>
> "Inaction of the Author.  If an author doesn't defend their property
> rights, then they can lose the right to assert them anywhere."
>
> This is not valid for copyright.
It's true only of trademarks, as far as I know.  But maybe
trademark would be a better way to protect a conlang,
if you wanted to protect it, than copyright....?  As far as
I know there have been no test cases about how copyright
(or trademark or patent) applies to conlangs themselves
(as opposed to tutorials, grammar descriptions and
dictionaries, to which the application of copyright law is
fairly obvious).

If the article has such an obvious error, I would hesitate to trust
the rest of it.  What are Mr. Martin's credentials -- is he an
intellectual propery lawyer, for instance?  I'm not one, but
I know that intellectual property law is complicated enough
that much of what non-lawyers say about it based on doing
a little research turns out to be oversimplified if not outright
wrong.

Mr Martin says:

"Copyright prohibits not only derivate works of that sort, but
also writing and publishing a silly poem in toki pona which
may be entirely grammatical and in the spirit of the language
design and grammar."

-- but I am not sure what his source or authority for saying
that is.  As far as I know copyright law does not say anything
explicit about conlangs and it is not obvious which way a court
would rule if someone wrote a text in a conlang someone else
created and got sued for "creating [or distributing] a
prohibited derivative work".  And in fact, I think his statement
about Toki Pona is factually wrong, since Sonja Kisa is on
record somewhere as saying that her copyright only applies
to her description of the language, not to what other people
write in or about the language.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm

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