Message-ID: <52C2E175.6050907@lojban.org>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:23:33 -0500
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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To: David Lenton <dave.lenton@gmail.com>, lojban@lojban.org
Subject: Re: Legal nature of the language
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On 12/29/2013 11:17 PM, David Lenton wrote:
> Thanks for the quick reply Robin,
>
> I'm glad to hear that news. I had to ask because an interesting script
> called Circular Gallifreyan, modeled to look like the symbols on Dr.
> Who, /is/ under copyright; and while it isn't technically a language, I
> needed to be sure.
>
> Thanks for fighting that in court, you've set a tremendous legal
> precedent for the future.
>
> On 30 December 2013 00:13, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org
> <mailto:rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>> wrote:
>
>     On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 11:06:05PM -0400, David Lenton wrote:
>      > Good day,
>      >
>      > My name is Dave Lenton, and I'm fascinated by Lojban. A friend of
>      > mine is writing a story featuring a society that has constructed
>      > its own, efficient language.  In lieu of creating their own, I
>      > offered to investigate if Lojban was an option.
>      >
>      > What I'm asking is what is the legal nature of the language. Is it
>      > under copyright? Creative commons? GNU Free Public License?
>
>     A language cannot by copyrighted; Lojban fought extensively in court
>     to cause that to be true.
>
>     In additional, the gismu and cmavo lists are both public domain.
>     I'm actually not sure about the CLL?, but I don't think that matters
>     for your purposes.  Have fun, let us know what you come up with.
>
>     The main mailing list often likes to help with these sorts of
>     things.


To correct Robin, the LLG fight was NOT over copyright, but rather over 
the claimed trademark for "Loglan".  And the win wasn't necessarily 
about the nature of a language name as trademark-able, but rather more 
about whether, after years of promoting non-commercial use of Loglan, 
the name could be asserted to be a commercial property.  There are 
trademarked computer languages, however.

I am not absolutely sure of the current case law on the subject.  It has 
been more than 20 years

At the time we fought the matter, the computer language Forth had 
trademark and perhaps copyright protection (I can't recall the details), 
and implementations of the language by other vendors besides the Forth 
Corporation used name variations, and made some changes in the language. 
  There were legal maneuverings, but I am not sure that a court case was 
fought.

"Loglan" had been used independently of JCB as the name of a computer 
language, similar to ALGOL, and promoted by a Polish organization.  This 
was one argument in our trademark case, but not the key one.

There is some question about what, if any, intellectual property rights 
can accrue to a language.  Most often this comes up in relation to 
computer languages.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120413141851964
is a recent discussion pertaining to the Oracle/Google dispute, which 
involves copyright law.

Dictionaries can be, and are, copyrighted, as are some kinds of lists 
(which might include a word list, but it gets tricky when the word list 
is a defining basis for the language.  This is why we remade the word 
list for Lojban - to ensure that copyright was not an issue).  The most 
relevant case law at the time involved the copyrightability of telephone 
books as lists of numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

As to Lojban, all of the language definition materials (wordlists, and 
the YACC grammar which is the official statement of the language 
grammar) are in the public domain.  CLL was published under a copyright 
notice similar to the GNU license.

lojbab