[lojban] Re: Loglan

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 03:49 PM 12/5/02 -0500, Robert McIvor wrote:
>On Mercredi, déce 4, 2002, at 20:18 US/Eastern, And Rosta wrote:
> >> I, on the other hand, did make a concious choice.  I was actually
> >> canvassing all sources I could find for a logical language.  The
> >> *instant* I discovered that Loglan was copywritten, I dropped it in
> >> favour of lojban
> >
> > Yes, that is a good reason. (I am assuming you mean what I would call
> > "copyrighted" and not "copywritten".) I have never seen a TLI statement
> > of its position on copyright, though.
> >
>         As far as I know, it was never asserted to other than LLG, with whom
>there had also been acrimonious litigation with regard to the name
>'Loglan' He had a personal animosity towards Logbab whom he remained
>convinced had acted dishonestly with Loglan materials which he had
>demanded to be returned.

It's ancient history, but the copyright claims (coupled with my general 
tendency to act independently) were what started the whole disagreement, 
were not limited to LLG and me, and preceded the fight.  He may also have 
claimed copyright in his disagreement with Carter.

JCB was upset with me because I had put out the first JL using the mailing 
list I had gotten from John Lees; JCB was in Europe and incommunicado; I 
had tried to work out with John a coordination between what he was doing 
with Lognet and what I was doing with the first JL, and he just said that I 
should put out Lognet.  I felt that assuming editorship of Lognet would be 
presumptuous and I did not want to be limited to paid members of TLI so I 
went with JL, but he offered to send me the mailing list (I may have asked) 
and did so.  JCB also was upset with me because I had hosted the first 
Fairfax Logfest, at which I had made copies of the draft 40-odd pages of 
Notebook 3, which he had given me for review, we did a group review, and I 
sent JCB the comments.  He also was upset with me because I had done all 
these things and not made progress on the dictionary update (I was stymied 
by the conflicts between multiple gismu lists, and Nora and I had assembled 
a set of comments and questions for JCB to resolve when he got back from 
overseas.)

At any rate, JCB was generally feeling distrustful of me, and then when I 
sent him a copy of LogFlash and  told him we had put it up on a BBS as 
Shareware, he insisted that the wordlists were copyrighted, and that TLI 
had ownership of the LogFlash algorithm and we would have to pay royalties 
on each copy distributed.  Since Nora and I disagreed on both of these 
things (and it was impossible to track how many copies of the software were 
being downloaded), we each protested and refused, JCB had a lawyer send us 
a letter, and that was the start of the fight.  A couple of months later, 
he "fired me" as dictionary editor/updater and demanded that I send him all 
the stuff he had given me, the address list (which he had been upset about 
my using it before, but had not asked for it back), as well as all the work 
I had done which he claimed ownership of because I was an "unpaid 
employee", and erase all of it from my own system.  Again I refused, and 
that is when we severed civil relations.

A couple of months later he refused to fill my order for several copies of 
L4/L5 for use in the Loglan class I was running, and at that point, one of 
the students suggested that we just make up new words to avoid his 
copyright claims.  That was the start of Lojban.

About a year later, when we had started working on the Lojban grammar 
(about the time that Bob McIvor visited us at LogFest) JCB made copyright 
claims and general ownership claims over Jeff Prothero's work on the 
grammar, as well as trademark claims on Loglan, and he had his lawyer send 
a nasty letter to Jeff.  Jeff disputed this noting that his YACC work had 
been done as a student using University of Washington facilities, that he 
had never signed over any rights to TLI, and that if his work was 
copyrighted at all or claimed to be a commercial product, that UW would 
probably have legal claims if there were any to be made.  When the 
following year, JCB notified us that he had registered a trademark on 
"Loglan", Jeff and I agreed to challenge the trademark through LLG on order 
to stop the legal maneuvers and threats, and the two of us more or less 
financed the legal challenge to the trademark, which was finally won in 
1992 (Unfortunately this drained us both emotionally and financially so 
that LLG has been struggling since then, and my leadership hasn't been as 
robust as it needed to be.)

End of ancient history.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org



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