Re: Interesting article about conlangs and the law

Since I live in Canada the laws may be a bit different. According to the
Canadian  Intellectual Property Office, "copyright applies to all original
literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works." I define my conlang as an
artlang. I therefore consider it a work of art and as such would be covered
under Canadian Copyright law. Sadly am neither attorney nor judge nor law
maker so my pronouncement holds no more water than a collander but at least
I have something to look to.

-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On
Behalf Of li_sasxsek@NUTTER.NET
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 11:39 AM
To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: Re: Interesting article about conlangs and the law

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
> > "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).
Since a language is more of a method, then I would think a patent would be
the only way, but then again language could be judged to generic to be
patented.  The trademark approach may work with the name, but you can't
really trademark the grammar, and it would be a huge stretch to try an
trademark each lexical item, even if it was possible.


> 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.
And most laws and their interpretations are biased towards the needs and
desires of the big businesses that profit from them.


> "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.
This is fairly consistent with the notice I've been putting in my materials.
The materials are protected, but I obviously have no control over the works
of others.

	http://www.nutter.net/sasxsek/files/sasxsek_eng.pdf  (page
3)

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