Is Klingon (the language) Copyrighted? How About Tolkien Elvish?

If words are made up as part of a language used in a work or fiction, are they copyrighted? Can I publish a Bible in Tolkien Elvish without having to send a pile of money to Professor Tolkien’s estate?

Can I make a recipe and call it Lembas?

How do you copyright a language? If it hasn’t been taken, can I copyright swahili?

I’m pretty sure Klingon is copyrighted by the Star Trek people.

The Tolkien estate has kept rather tight control over Elvish. See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/lotr.html?pg=7. If you tried to make commercial use of the word lembas or anything else created by JRRT, that would probably be a no-no.

When you create a fanciful work, the particular expression of it is copyrighted automatically as soon as you set it in a permanent form. Thus words of a fake language are copyrightable to mean the things in your Fakese dictionary. Other people, however, may use the sounds, providing they are originally created by them without copying your work, to mean other things.

So the answer is yes, Elvish and Klingon are copyrighted.

Take a look at the various websites for Tolkienian linguistics that are referenced in this page:

http://www.elvish.org/

Go to the Resources page for a lot of links.

Apparently the Tolkien estate isn’t making a huge effort to stop noncommercial uses of Elvish and others of Tolkien’s languages, so there are a lot of fanzines and websites out there which use the languages. They probably feel about them approximately the way that Gene Roddenberry felt about all the fanzines and such that were based on Star Trek, which was that he couldn’t possibly put cease-and-desist orders on all of it, and it helped publicize the original works. The Tolkien estate is, though, coming down hard on commercial uses of his languages.

This means that you can’t use Elvish words as names for commercial products. You can’t write a book or a magazine article that uses the languages in any substantial way without permission. (But you can quote a single sentence in a review, for instance.) You can probably get away with discussing Elvish in a fanzine or a website, but who knows what the real legal status of such things are. Carl Hostetter warns in the above mentioned website that a lot of the discussions of Elvish in such fanzines and websites are linguistically naive and inaccurate.

I don’t understand how copyright is working these days. I was taught that you can’t copyright ideas, only their expression. But then there was that suit over “The wind done gone” which lost, but someone must have thought they had a case. There was no assertion of copying, I think, but they were claiming the story, not the expression of it, could be owned. The recent flap over Pi was another example. Then when Don Kingsbury wrote a sequel to Asimov’s Foundation (much better than the original, BTW), he changed all the names of the people, planets, etc. to avoid copyright problems. Can anyone explain where these boundaries really are?

The boundaries are whatever the courts determine.

Also, the issue is complicated by trademark law. Often, corporations trademark things (like Star Trek or Mickey Mouse) are are suing under that rather than copyright law.

I believe “The Wind Done Gone” suit (I was actually part of a group asked to make a friend of the court brief by the GWTW people, though we declined) was claiming that the book was infringing on the GWTW trademark and thus was hurting its value. It was also asking for prior restraint – alleging the book would cause damage and should not be published. The judge, wisely, invoked the parody loophole in copyright law and told GWTW that, if the parody causes damages, they could then sue.

BTW, since Mickey Mouse is a trademark, Disney never needed the copyright extension and, indeed, despite the myth, it wasn’t their idea to change the term from life+50 to life+70. You need to blame Hitler for that one.

HERESY! BLASPHEMY!.

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errr, how was this sequel called… not that i intend to read it…

:wink:

Quite likely, in the case of The Wind Done Gone, the action was based on the book being a “derivative work.” (Example, if I decided to write my own sequel to Interview with a Vampire using the characters Lestat et al., and the same settings, my derivative work would be infringing unless I was in some kind of licencing agreement.)

IIRC, The Wind… claimed it was a parody (which, apparently was pretty obvious if you read it.)

The Story of Pi is different because the concept of “cat and human in a small boat” is the only thing in common. The stories are VERY different, and you can’t copyright and idea/concept.

The various books are copyrighted, in the same way that dictionaries are copyrighted, but if you wanted to speak Klingon, no one would stop you.

The Warrior’s Tongue was invented by Dr. Marc Okrand at the behest of the Star Trek producers, who wanted a believable language in the movies and so wrote The Klingon Dictionary http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067174559X/102-3311868-3929769 , which should grace all complete libraries. For the impatient, the Klingon On-Line Dictionary http://www.beyond.olm.net/klingon.html provides Star Trek-like controls for translating words.

I’m sure, however (though I’m not a lawyer), that the word “Klingon” itself is trademarked. Similarly, Elvish and Tolkien’s works. Way back when, TSR, the company that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, used words like “Hobbit” and “Ent” in the game, but were stopped by a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate. (They later tried to trademark the word “Nazi”, but failed.)

As RealityChuck (love the name!) has pointed out, copyright laws are different than trademark laws. These are not widely understood and confusion reigns while hilarity ensues.