Can you copyright a fictional language?

In My Humble Opinion
1

That’s one of the questions in front of a California district court. This particular case involves Klingon, which makes it more complex than usual — it being a much more developed system than a lot of other fictional languages, with the backing of a huge entertainment corporation.

In this particular case, the language question is but one aspect of Paramount’s case against a fan film. That may still leave a basic question unaddressed: can you or can you not copyright a language that you made up?

What do you think?

2

I don’t see why; a language, by definition, is a means of communication. How can one use it ( unthinkingly and easily as one uses one’s mother tongue ) if the words are at another’s control ?
At one time some clever chap added words to Sanskrit, they would not have come into universal use if his contemporaries had owed him damages every time they uttered them or wrote them down.

All this fucking legalism is eroding the freedom to grow. And culture itself.

3

I disagree with Claverhouse. If you develop an artificial language as part of a fictional tale you are telling, I would think that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, its your creation, your effort etc. I think it would be a perfectly ok thing to stop someone from using you language in another publication, whatever the format, without your approval and compensation.

However, if the fan base for your story grow large enough and people from your fan base learn and start using your artificial language conversationally amongst themselves and words from your artificial language start slipping into common usage outside your fanbase, what are you going to do? How does Paramount defend against that?

I’m startled everytime I hear “kapla” (q’apla?) used, but I’ve heard it 3 times this year already.
SUCCESS!
chaz

4

There is a language invented for a book called “The de Bono code”.

Edit: it isn’t really a fictional language.

5

Why isn’t the fictional Klingon race copyrighted?

6

Absolutely you should be able to.

Copyright, but definition, is preventing other people from using your own, original creation (generally for profit) without your permission.

If a language is something you created, then you should have the ability to prevent other people from profiting off of it.

Are there caveats/exceptions? Yeah. Copyright is a very fluid thing and it’s hard to pin down. and it’s MHO that copyright claims should chill a bit. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that if it’s an original language that you created it should be copyrightable.

7

Right. Think about the ramifications if language itself was copyrightable. Basic textbook publishers would modify the language slightly, push the new textbooks onto school districts (“New, improved modern usage for the high-tech age!”), wait for the kids to grow up, and then nail them for violating the copyright of the proprietary “dialect” that is now their native language.

8

James Brown apparently copyrighted Loglan. I don’t know whether it went to court, or if lawyers ever got involved, but the community of practitioners seemed to feel that it was necessary to start from scratch to create a new language that could be controlled by more than one person.

(A different James Brown.)

9

This is a fictional language developed by one (or a few) people, not an actual, extant method of communication (though Klingon seems to be popular enough among nerds that Paramount has probably missed the bus in my view).

10

I would assume that you would have copyrights to anything you create in the language, any glosses or dictionaries you write and so on but the actual grammar, vocabulary, syntax, etc would be utilitarian and not protected by copyright.

I am curious what any of the board lawyers would say.

11

You can’t copyright an idea or a concept. You copyright things you write or draw. So you can’t copyright the idea of Klingons, but you can copyright descriptions and depictions of them.

Names of things aren’t copyrighted either, but they can be trademarked. Paramount owns 20+ trademarks on “Klingon” and “Klingon Encounter” from toys, t-shirts, hats, CD-games to, of all things, wine and BBQ sauce. Someone else owns the trademark on alcohol related products.

Previous thread from 2002 - Is Klingon (the language) Copyrighted? How About Tolkien Elvish? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board

12

In this case, the grammar, vocabulary and syntax are all individual creative works.

13

Can a file format be copyrighted?

14

You mean, like PDF, Jpeg, etc.?

It’s … complicated.

If there is original work in creating a file format, the best method is to patent it. E.g., MS has patented the NTFS file system and that makes it hard to people to sell, for example, removable media in that format or to write programs that directly access an NTFS file system.

Ditto some media file formats like some forms of WMV, mpeg, etc.

You can also copyright the specification and restrict access of that to certain people. E.g., the full DVD spec document can only be obtained from the DVD Forum for a large fee and signing a non-disclosure agreement.

You can also just not ever tell anyone the format and keep it a trade secret. But it’s legal to figure out a trade secret on your own. E.g., people work backwards to try and figure out MS Word’s encoding so they can make compatible programs.

An individual instance of a mpeg video and such is of course born copyrighted by whoever creates it.

In regards to computer languages, Microsoft got into trouble with J++, their version of Sun’s Java language and Sun ended up suing them. But not for copyright/patent/etc. reasons. MS had a deal with Sun to develop their own compatible version of Java, but J++ failed Sun’s tests so Sun sued and won. J++ was later dropped by MS for J# and friends. But all this was based on a prior contract.

Oracle, which bought out Sun, has been vigilant in protecting Java. They are in a long battle with Google over Google’s version of Java used in Android.

This nastiness is over the interfaces (APIs) found in function definitions and such. Google wrote their own implementations of the functions but kept the same interfaces. Oracle claims copyright on the interfaces. Google claims they aren’t really creative enough to deserve copyright protection.

For human/artificial languages, the equivalent would be sort of dictionary like. If person A copies person B’s Klingon dictionary, keeping the word list, pronunciation, etc. but writing their own definitions, that may or may not be copyright infringement. Hire a bunch of lawyers and enjoy the show.

15

Cite for NTFS being patented? Or, better, attempted enforcement actions against Linux developers or Apple for building and distributing alternate implementations? As far as I know parents aren’t an issue, just the fact that Microsoft considers it proprietary and doesn’t publish a detailed spec. Others can and do try to make compatible implementations but it’s difficult because there are a lot of details to get right and one little mistake can totally trash the file system.

As far as removable devices, it’s just not designed for that use case (for example, it you don’t cleanly unmount it you have to check the whole file system for consistency and nobody wants to wait for that). Because of this, Windows will not let you format removable drives as NTFS (although there are unsupported hacks to enable it).

Microsoft couldn’t stop media vendors from selling removable media pre-formatted as NTFS; the fact that it’s not useful means there’s no market for it.

16

In the case of the Office binary file formats, Microsoft does actually publish specifications (and the new XML specs have always been documented). Here’s the link for Word: [MS-DOC]: Word (.doc) Binary File Format | Microsoft Learn

That’s 577 pages. Good luck building a usable compatible implementation without going broke and/or getting left behind in the marketplace because you took so long.

17

That shows one of the critical differences between patents and trade secrets. A patent must, by virtue of the patent process, provide full public access to the underlying specs. This is, of course, so that others can (at least in theory) notice the patent and verify that they are not violating it unintentionally. A trade secret, on the other hand, derives its value from being secret and is much more of a “de facto” means of protection with relatively fewer legal enforcement mechanisms. The main enforcement method for a trade secret is don’t tell anyone else your trade secret!

18

I’m more on the patent side of things, but this seems right to me. There isn’t much caselaw about it though. I wouldn’t expect any decision from this case to elucidate anything as the language thing is just part of a long list of allegedly infringing elements.

19

My understanding is that you can copyright a particular expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. A language - even an invented one - is not a particular expression. A language has grammar that allows you to arrange words to express many different ideas, including those that no one has thought of yet. So I wouldn’t think a language could be copyrighted. A description of a language could be copyrighted, as could a dictionary, but not the language itself.

It’s conceivable, though, that an invented language could be patented.

20

The NTFS situation is complicated. There isn’t one identifiable NTFS patent. But MS makes various threats about IP rights when people try to make competing NTFS compatible products. When pressed, MS has never identified the actual patents or anything that might be infringed. (The thinking being that if they were IDed, then the actual patents might be shown unoriginal and tossed.)

So they play the FUD game. Small to medium companies can’t afford to fight MS so they stop. Really large companies have patent sharing deals. But since MS has never published the full specs (some stuff is documented, other stuff worked out, still some things baffle us), even if you think MS isn’t going to sue you, you might be in the dark about something important to your particular disk utility.