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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