Re: Interesting article about conlangs and the law

On 9/13/07, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> 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.
Perhaps the Klingonists would be someone to talk to about this -- the
impression I get is that there's some vague legalism lurking in the
background and that Paramount has (or asserts) some kind of rights to
the language itself (not just e.g. _The Klingon Dictionary_).

I don't remember the nature of the rights (copyright? trademark?
possibly the latter, since IIRC they have a trademark on the name
"Klingon(s)") nor the consequences people felt.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>