copyright

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enash
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Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:36 am

copyright

Post by enash »

Simple enough question: If someone were to write a fiction book with parts or even entirety in toki pona, would this violate any copyrights? In other words, can a constructed language be copyrighted and could such an author be sued?
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: copyright

Post by janKipo »

No, The Loglan-Lojban court battle in the 90s ended with the decision that neither a language or the words in a language can be copyrighted (or any of those other things like trademarks, etc.) Works in the language or about the language can be copyrighted in the usual way -- including particular grammars or dictionaries, but THE grammar of the language nor its words can be. Possibly a mixed blessing. I am not sure about the NAME of the language -- I suspect a direct copy is out, but close approximations (dogi bona, say) would probably be OK.
Translating copyrighted works is a different matter altogether. The basic rule is: don't do it. There are a large number of exceptions, but be very careful about what they really mean. The safest thing, obviously, is to get the copyright holder (author, publisher, estate, etc.)'s permission.
janMato
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Re: copyright

Post by janMato »

Conlang law is poorly tested in court. So if conlang law supported the creator and treats all fan created stuff like Harry Potter fan fic --and some conlangers really want this-- then the toki pona community is still okay because jan Sonja has release the base materials to a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Licence. Now what the non-commerical part means isn't completely clear. If I wrote a toki pona poem and offered it for sale, it might be okay, or might not. If I offered a copy of all the pages of the toki pona wiki for sale in book format, that would certainly not be legit under the CC license.

The fact that the CC license allows derivatives is important-- that means that posting free tp content to the web is explicitly okay. In the Elvish community, they had to fight for a long while about who had the right to do what with respect to the rights of the JRR Tolkien estate-- at the moment the regime is pretty fan friendly.

Re loglan/lojban. In Arika Orkent's book, it sounded like that the result could be interpreted narrowly to mean only that loglan couldn't be used as a trademark because it was already being used as a generic word, same as we can't put a trademark on "logic". Everyone agrees that if I publish a "Klingon Anthology" that Paramount could challenge the use of "Klingon" and possibly "tlIngan"

Re: translating copyrighted work into toki pona
This is a big problem. A significant part of the toki pona corpus is translations of copyrighted work. I gathered most of the toki pona that exists on the web, only to realize that I can re-publish only a fraction of it. This would even be true for jan Sonja, if she were to publish the legendary book, she'd only be able to use materials that were translated from public domain, CC (with derivatives), or get each copyright holder to explicitly allow it.

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/Copyright
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