Re: Interesting article about conlangs and the law

Just to be clear: I am biased against copyrights in general, and I am not
a copyright (or any other sort of) lawyer, and #include <stddisclamer.h>.

> From: Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:16:08 -0400
>
> 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."
There was some discussion[1] about this on the PIJIP-Copyright list in
july, I think the conclusion was uncertainty, but the two conditionals
(in US law) were: whether a conlang is creative (a Huffman encoding of
{natlang} wouldn't qualify), and if languages fall under Section 102b:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship
extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation,
concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is
described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
<http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html>

Conlangs in general are creative works, certainly, but I would place them
squarely under ideas, systems, and concepts, and so, immune to copyright.

(For a UK perspective) My understanding of UK law is that there is a list
of sorts of works (and only those sorts) to which copyright applies; when
looking it through I failed to fit a language, only realizations of them.

See <http://www.jenkins-ip.com/patlaw/cdpa1.htm> for the complete act.

> 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".
I am fairly certain there is no mention of conlangs (the closest seen is
some mention of programming languages in the UK act, but only insofar as
it applies to programs), in any copyright law (I only checked the UK and
US), and the closest the PIJIP-Copyright list came in courtlaw was again
programming languages, which were ruled uncopyrightable (if I remember).

enjoy,
tristan

(who is here for more than the off-topicish things, dispite the evidence)

[1] <http://roster.wcl.american.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0707d&L=pijip-copyright&P=5415>

--
All original matter is hereby placed immediately in to the public domain.