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Or, to translate it for our Klingon speaking friends...

qaStaHvIS Seng paramount qej "Copyright tlhIngan pagh SoH"

https://www.inverse.com/article/15234-you-can-t-copyright-klingon-means-paramount-is-in-trouble


The entire court filing is available in the link provided above.

majQa'.

So funny thing. I actually got my gradutation announcment to say "Thank You Mom" in klingon.
And I applied for the multi language greeting at the beggining of the ceremony to say "Hello" in klingon. Their fighting me on that.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So funny thing. I actually got my gradutation announcment to say "Thank You Mom" in klingon.
And I applied for the multi language greeting at the beggining of the ceremony to say "Hello" in klingon. Their fighting me on that.

I'd fight you on that too, considering that there is no word for "Hello" in Klingon. Not to mention that "Thank you" is probably the least Klingon thing you could say. Cultural appropriation at its finest!

I'd argue that if the author actually created the language it's theirs. I think if fans took some words here and there, created an entire phonology, orthology, and lexicon (which is what happened with Klingon), it doesn't belong to the person who created 20 odd words. 20 odd words aren't a language no matter how you string them together.

Of course, this is America, where copyright laws will never be sensible.

 Hordini wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So funny thing. I actually got my gradutation announcment to say "Thank You Mom" in klingon.
And I applied for the multi language greeting at the beggining of the ceremony to say "Hello" in klingon. Their fighting me on that.

I'd fight you on that too, considering that there is no word for "Hello" in Klingon. Not to mention that "Thank you" is probably the least Klingon thing you could say. Cultural appropriation at its finest!

Hello= nuqneH(what do you want)
And Thank you is included in the language, it just isnt used by klingons that much.

So according to Paramount, a language is only a language if there exist people for whom it's native?

BRB, copyrighting every extinct language now there are no native-speakers left with whom to communicate. Doesn't matter that people may well still speak it now and communicate in it, they weren't the original users.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'd argue that if the author actually created the language it's theirs. I think if fans took some words here and there, created an entire phonology, orthology, and lexicon (which is what happened with Klingon), it doesn't belong to the person who created 20 odd words. 20 odd words aren't a language no matter how you string them together.

Of course, this is America, where copyright laws will never be sensible.

Would he have made the language if Paramount didn't have Klingons to begin with? It seems like the language may be his but the word Klingon probably isn't. Maybe they can choose a non-copyrighted name for it.

I think you could totally copyright the word Klingon if you invented it, and the 20 odd words of Klingon that are actually yours. But in the end that's kind of moot. The fan film could simply avoid using the word Klingon, and use every other word, and at least to people familiar with it it's still Klingon. At that point though, Paramount and the courts are trapped in the preposterous position that the word "Klingon" is easily avoided, and the other 20 words can probably just be fudged. Their copyright is worthless, while fans have effectively cooped the entire concept unto themselves.

Alternatively, the court could rule completely for Paramount, but at that point they're pretty much given creative property to someone whose role was essentially putting the idea in someone else's head, which legally is a giant black hole for our already butchered copyright laws. It's also just shooting yourself in the foot, as functionally a fan film isn't a threat to your market share. This all kind of routes back to fan fiction existing in a giant legal gray area. What constitutes a derivative work under US case law, and what rights the makers of a derivative work have is extremely unclear.

This is kind of a no-win scenario.

You can't copyright words. You can't copyright inventions.

You can copyright computer algorithms, but the grammar structure of a language isn't an algorithm, and can be argued to be based on existing languages' grammatical rules.

If Paramount could invent a language that didn't use verbs, nouns and so on, they might have a better claim. This probably is impossible though, since language development seems to be an instinct. At any rate, Klingon is a clearly understandable language in which the words have been made up during the past 40 years.

All languages are made up, anyway. English didn't exist 1,000 years ago. Shakespeare invented loads of new words.

 LordofHats wrote:
This is kind of a no-win scenario.

Would you say it is a...Kobayashi Maru?

 Ahtman wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
This is kind of a no-win scenario.

Would you say it is a...Kobayashi Maru?

There we are and good night folks. I don't think this thread can go on any further after that.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Hordini wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
So funny thing. I actually got my gradutation announcment to say "Thank You Mom" in klingon.
And I applied for the multi language greeting at the beggining of the ceremony to say "Hello" in klingon. Their fighting me on that.

I'd fight you on that too, considering that there is no word for "Hello" in Klingon. Not to mention that "Thank you" is probably the least Klingon thing you could say. Cultural appropriation at its finest!

Hello= nuqneH(what do you want)
And Thank you is included in the language, it just isnt used by klingons that much.

Exactly. nuqneH can be used as a greeting of sorts, but doesn't mean hello, it means "what do you want?" qajatlh doesn't mean hello either, but it can also be used as a greeting, meaning "I talk to you."

 Ahtman wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
This is kind of a no-win scenario.

Would you say it is a...Kobayashi Maru?

Ow!

Damn, I hurt my finger Exalting so hard....

Y'know after breaking my head against Japanese, Chinese and Hindi I still cannot understand why anyone would spend time and energy learning Klingon, Elfish or whatever.

I mean there are REAL LANGUAGES out there with millennia of history spoken by BILLIONS OF PEOPLE. Yeah I like Klingons too, but at the end of the day samurai are more interesting and y'know, real.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Y'know after breaking my head against Japanese, Chinese and Hindi I still cannot understand why anyone would spend time and energy learning Klingon, Elfish or whatever.

I mean there are REAL LANGUAGES out there...

And so is Klingon.

...with millennia of history spoken by BILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

That's a poor choice of words. A language's written history has some value to a modern student, if the language has not drifted so far as to make it unreadable. A spoken language only has relevance as long as it is possible to listen to it, which is basically zero time.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
So according to Paramount, a language is only a language if there exist people for whom it's native?

BRB, copyrighting every extinct language now there are no native-speakers left with whom to communicate. Doesn't matter that people may well still speak it now and communicate in it, they weren't the original users.

Claim ownership of Latin, watch the world burn.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'd argue that if the author actually created the language it's theirs. I think if fans took some words here and there, created an entire phonology, orthology, and lexicon (which is what happened with Klingon), it doesn't belong to the person who created 20 odd words. 20 odd words aren't a language no matter how you string them together.

Of course, this is America, where copyright laws will never be sensible.

No. Copyrighting a language is quite simply ridiculous, no matter who created it. I mean, what exactly did the creator of Klingon invent? Consonants? Vowels? Syllables? Phonemes? Morphemes? All that the creator of Klingon created already existed. You can't "create" words. At most you can create a new meaning for a word, but then you could copyright only the meaning, not the word itself. A word itself is nothing but an arbitrary combination of phonemes. How could that ever be copyrightable? Ultimately, all the creator of Klingon did was to assign arbitrary meanings to morphemes made up out of pre-existing phonemes.

Conlangs are not the same thing as language. Compare to Sindarin, and the other Lord of the Rings languages, which are copyrighted by the Tolkien Estate. Really, wheher or not a constructed language falls under copyright protections or is public domain is really going to hinge on how it was created and how the creator(s) regard its use. EDIT: And of course, I don't think there have been many lawsuits or cases hashing any of this stuff out.

I can make up a new phoneme. Let me show you how. All I need is a chair, a fork, and a whole lot of duct tape.


And a volunteer.

 LordofHats wrote:
Conlangs are not the same thing as language. Compare to Sindarin, and the other Lord of the Rings languages, which are copyrighted by the Tolkien Estate. Really, wheher or not a constructed language falls under copyright protections or is public domain is really going to hinge on how it was created and how the creator(s) regard its use. EDIT: And of course, I don't think there have been many lawsuits or cases hashing any of this stuff out.

And how exactly is a "constructed language" different from a language? Every language is a constructed language in the end.
I highly doubt as to whether the Tolkien Estate's copyright on Sindarin would hold if it ever came to a court case on it. Especially, because EU courts have already ruled that programming languages are not copyrightable. Copyright law does not protect ideas, methods or systems. A language is a system for conveying information. Therefore, languages are not copyrightable.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And how exactly is a "constructed language" different from a language? Every language is a constructed language in the end.

Not in terms of linguistics. A language like English, Spanish, or Chinese, is developed by a society, evolved, and used by a community for the purpose of communication. There are "natural" processes by which a "language" comes into being. It's comparable to evolution in a lot of ways. On the other hand a conlang is invented spontaneously (relatively speaking). A community did not create Sindarin. J.R.R. Tolkein did, and he has an innate right to the product of his own creative processes, and by extension it's part of his, or in this case his descendants, IP rights. That's not really up for debate, at least not in US copyright law (which is the only Copyright law I really know anything about). I don't really disagree with it either. It's a lot of work making up a language, assuming I don't want to be lazy about it (which I don't, I've been working on Aran going on ten years now).

The hurdle I think Paramount runs into, is that on its own the Klingon Dictionary as published in 1985 is not a functional language. It's more like a viewers guide to what was used in Star Trek III, the first time Klingon's speaking Klingon appeared on screen. Further it's mostly just a lexicon with some simplistic grammar rules and an orthography (which isn't nearly as important to language as people think it is). A community of fans took that proto-speak and turned it into a functioning language. Fans developed the phonology, syntax, tone, and and most importantly the morphology of Klingon. Fans fleshed out the bulk of the lexicon. Klingon as it currently exists, is more a product of the fan base than Paramount or Marc Okrand. The later of whom only wrote the Dictionary in the first place as a guide for actors and script writers. They can probably get away with copyrighting the dictionary, and the word "Klingon" and the various words that have been on screen, but all the rest of it is (I'd hope), outside their reach.

Of course, I doubt the court will give a damn about any of that. I think the court is likely to rule in Paramounts favor, at least when it comes to this fan film. They might dodge the language bit question entirely by simply not answering it. I'm not sure on what the exact arrangement between Marc Okrand and Paramount is on the Klingon Dictionary (does Okrand own the copyright on it, or does Paramount?). It's not outside the realm of possibility for the court to rule that Paramount does own Klingon on the grounds of IP rights.

I highly doubt as to whether the Tolkien Estate's copyright on Sindarin would hold if it ever came to a court case on it.

I don't know that it's ever been challenged honestly, but I don't think it's as clear cut as you might think. I highly doubt the court will rule against Paramount on this. All they need is a professional linguist willing to take the stand and sat Klingon isn't a real language, and I don't think they'll need to look very far.

Especially, because EU courts have already ruled that programming languages are not copyrightable.

Yeah I don't know jack about copyright laws outside the US, but I do know that isn't what the court said. That's what bad reporting said the court said. SAS v WPL had an extremely narrow scope, and functionally just made reverse engineering software not an infringement of copyright, but did not bare programming languages from being copyrighted per se. One of the judges related to the case went on to say that he didn't think programming languages was something where copyright would be able to hold up, which is logical but not law from that case. His comment is the only thing anyone reported. On the other hand, the exact same case in US courts actually went to SAS, with the jury ruling that WPL had engaged in unfair business practices (so what WPL did is currently legal in the EU, but illegal in the US).

The actual issue of who "owns" programming languages is completely unclear in part because so many of them are purposefully not copyrighted. Bjarne Stroustrup, for example, who created the original C++ programming language, never patented it. Essentially, it's been freeware since the day it was born. Python. Ruby. Basic. Java. They're all distributed as freeware. The reason no one owns copyrights on programming languages at the moment isn't a matter of law. It's a matter that no one has ever tried to assert ownership (usually what is owned are compilers, or specific language versions, but these are not that valuable on their own). Most programming languages that exist today are based in the ones produced in the 60s and 70s, and it turns out the guys who made those were super hippy about it.

The issue with languages is that they are tools. The person who invented a new way of carving wood does not get to claim ownership of something made using their method. A person who invented a programming language does not get to claim ownership of or prevent people making programs using their code language. A paint company does not own the models you paint.

So does that mean that the various Tolkien-created and inspired languages are not copyrightable? hmm.

 SilverMK2 wrote:
The issue with languages is that they are tools. The person who invented a new way of carving wood does not get to claim ownership of something made using their method.

If I invent a "Hat Wood Carver" that has sufficiently obtained a copyright, then I can express my IP rights to the "Hat Wood Carver" however I please. The simple reality is how exactly am I going to make money off the "Hat Wood Carver?" Either I'm making wood carvings with it, which are presumably also my IP via a business, or I'm selling it as a product for other people to use in which case the carver itself is still my IP, but whatever you make with it is yours via some kind of user license agreement (otherwise there's no point in my having made the carver... Unless I'm some fortune 500 company who just doesn't want a competitor to use this hypthotical carving method to hurt my market share).

Either way the tool itself is still my IP. I made it. Who made English? That's like a twisted chicken and egg scenario. It's really not the same thing as something like Dothraki, Sindarin, or Mandalorian, which can be traced to specific inventors who can lay claim to them as creative works.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

And how exactly is a "constructed language" different from a language? Every language is a constructed language in the end.

Not in terms of linguistics. A language like English, Spanish, or Chinese, is developed by a society, evolved, and used by a community for the purpose of communication. There are "natural" processes by which a "language" comes into being. It's comparable to evolution in a lot of ways. On the other hand a conlang is invented spontaneously (relatively speaking). A community did not create Sindarin. J.R.R. Tolkein did, and he has an innate right to the product of his own creative processes, and by extension it's part of his, or in this case his descendants, IP rights. That's not really up for debate, at least not in US copyright law (which is the only Copyright law I really know anything about). I don't really disagree with it either. It's a lot of work making up a language, assuming I don't want to be lazy about it (which I don't, I've been working on Aran going on ten years now).

That line is actually much more blurry than you think. There is no linguistic definition for a constructed language. Most natural languages such as English, Dutch, Russian etc. have been purposely constructed to a large degree. The modern English language for example is the way it is largely because of the effort of a small number of prescriptive grammarists in the 16th century and then again in the 19th century. The development of literary languages is not comparable to evolution, but rather to intelligent design or in some cases downright creationism. This is especially true for so-called creole languages (languages that started out as artificial trade pidgins).
Meanwhile, a language like Klingon or Sindarin has also had a lot of input of a larger community. Neither Klingon nor Sindarin were functional languages when they were published. They were made into what they are today by the community. Linguistically, the line between a recently constructed language like Sindarin and a dead language like Latin is extremely hard to draw, as the only real difference is in the age of the language and the complexity of its development. The line becomes even more blurry when a recently constucted language gets native speakers. At that point there really is not a single thing anymore that you could use to draw a line.

 LordofHats wrote:
The hurdle I think Paramount runs into, is that on its own the Klingon Dictionary as published in 1985 is not a functional language. It's more like a viewers guide to what was used in Star Trek III, the first time Klingon's speaking Klingon appeared on screen. Further it's mostly just a lexicon with some simplistic grammar rules and an orthography (which isn't nearly as important to language as people think it is). A community of fans took that proto-speak and turned it into a functioning language. Fans developed the phonology, syntax, tone, and and most importantly the morphology of Klingon. Fans fleshed out the bulk of the lexicon. Klingon as it currently exists, is more a product of the fan base than Paramount or Marc Okrand. The later of whom only wrote the Dictionary in the first place as a guide for actors and script writers. They can probably get away with copyrighting the dictionary, and the word "Klingon" and the various words that have been on screen, but all the rest of it is (I'd hope), outside their reach.

Of course, I doubt the court will give a damn about any of that. I think the court is likely to rule in Paramounts favor, at least when it comes to this fan film. They might dodge the language bit question entirely by simply not answering it. I'm not sure on what the exact arrangement between Marc Okrand and Paramount is on the Klingon Dictionary (does Okrand own the copyright on it, or does Paramount?). It's not outside the realm of possibility for the court to rule that Paramount does own Klingon on the grounds of IP rights.

The other major hurdle would be that systems are expressly not eligible for copyright. And any linguist will confirm that a language is a system. But apart from the Klingon language part, Paramount does indeed have a very strong case in this. The fan movie is very clearly infringing on Star Trek copyright, and the massive size and costs of the project unfortenately mean that it isn't really "fair use" anymore.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:

 SilverMK2 wrote:
The issue with languages is that they are tools. The person who invented a new way of carving wood does not get to claim ownership of something made using their method.

If I invent a "Hat Wood Carver" that has sufficiently obtained a copyright, then I can express my IP rights to the "Hat Wood Carver" however I please. The simple reality is how exactly am I going to make money off the "Hat Wood Carver?" Either I'm making wood carvings with it, which are presumably also my IP via a business, or I'm selling it as a product for other people to use in which case the carver itself is still my IP, but whatever you make with it is yours via some kind of user license agreement (otherwise there's no point in my having made the carver... Unless I'm some fortune 500 company who just doesn't want a competitor to use this hypthotical carving method to hurt my market share).

Either way the tool itself is still my IP. I made it. Who made English? That's like a twisted chicken and egg scenario. It's really not the same thing as something like Dothraki, Sindarin, or Mandalorian, which can be traced to specific inventors who can lay claim to them as creative works.

The tool would be your IP. But other people would still be free to make a tool that does exactly the same thing your tool does. You can copyright an individual tool, but not the methods, procedures, processes or ideas.
And as a language is a system to express ideas, well, maybe you see the trouble in trying to copyright that? So while you might be able copyright a word or a sentence you made up in a specific context, or a grammar you wrote, you could never own the right to the general phones (because you did not invent them) or to the language as whole (because it is a system). Therefore others would be free to use the same phones you used and arrange them according to the same system you used.
Here, this I got from the US copyright office:

Copyright protection extends to a description, explanation, or illustration of
an idea or system, assuming that the requirements of copyright law are met.
Copyright in such a case protects the particular literary or pictorial expression
chosen by the author. But it gives the copyright owner no exclusive rights in the
idea, method, or system involved.
Suppose, for example, that an author writes a book explaining a new system
for food processing. The copyright in the book, which comes into effect at the
moment the work is fixed in a tangible form, prevents others from copying or
distributing the text and illustrations describing the author’s system. But it will
not give the author any right to prevent others from adapting the system itself
for commercial or other purposes or from using any procedures, processes, or
methods described in the book.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ31.pdf

 Iron_Captain wrote:

That line is actually much more blurry than you think. There is no linguistic definition for a constructed language.

Linguists call it a "planned language." I think they find the word planned more descriptive for them than constructed, but planlang doesn't role of the tongue as good as conlang XD. There are even ways linguists have to classify them (a posteriori vs a priori, basically based on existent language vs completely made up).

Meanwhile, a language like Klingon or Sindarin has also had a lot of input of a larger community. Neither Klingon nor Sindarin were functional languages when they were published.

Klingon is not. Sindarin is. While the language in the books does not form a complete language, Tolkein's notes were... Well his notes are insane. Elvish (including the Sindarin subset) was first published in An Introduction to Elvish, which contained a complete and functional language. It was edited by a third party, but the it was pretty much just a cleaned up publication of Tolkein's notes. The guy approached world building like an anthropologist. His notes contain a very functional Sindarin lexicon, and more importantly Tolkein's languages actually had in built phonologies, morphologies, and tonal shifts from the get go. He even included complex language families, and fictional etymology! In fact Tolkein specifically identified his languages as an artistic exercise of his imagination. Tolkein was a linguist by profession. His created languages sparked the modern popularity of hobby, but few conlangs reach the level of sophistication of Tolkein if only because most conlangers are not trained as linguists (they're writers like me, or hobbyists who have grasped some basic tenets of linguistics).

Tolkein put more effort into developing his world of languages than I've put into my entire education (though to be fair, my education hasn't spanned half a century yet XD). Ultimately though, and for the purposes of hashing out how Sindarin is different from Klingon and different from English, everything that we know about Sindarin basically comes from a single hand. Tolkein's. It would not even remotely exist without him. I'm not keen on taking away an author's creative rights just because someone read and repeated the subject material to someone else.

Linguistically, the line between a recently constructed language like Sindarin and a dead language like Latin is extremely hard to draw, as the only real difference is in the age of the language and the complexity of its development.

Who invented Latin?

Who invented Sindarin?

The answer to the former is impossible. The best we can say is "the Romans," because functionally a "natural language" is not invented, but developed. The answer to the later is definitive; J.R.R. Tolkein. Klingon is one of a number of fictional languages that ends up falling into the middle, as it was "invented" by someone as a plot device or narrative tool, but was turned into a full language by someone else(s).

The other major hurdle would be that systems are expressly not eligible for copyright. And any linguist will confirm that a language is a system.

And? Windows is a system. A crappy, buggy, spyware laden system, but it's a system and its copyrighted. So is Steam. So is Amazon's weird little method of taking product photos bizarrely. Being a "system" has nothing to do with copyright. Linguists are likely to split on whether or not conlangs actually constitute language. In fact, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), tags conlangs as "art." Notably for this discussion, Klingon is not one of them! It is simply tagged as "tlh."

Linguists have even laid out how a constructed language might become a "true blue" language, and it all hinges on having native speakers and an evolving morphology. Esperanto has been around for over 100 years and only has 2000 native speakers tops (in 2004), and it's still considered constructed. Somehow, I doubt that a fictional language produced for a scifi television series is ever going to develop a large base of native speakers if only because I expect Paramount to burn the IP to the ground long before that can happen

But apart from the Klingon language part, Paramount does indeed have a very strong case in this. The fan movie is very clearly infringing on Star Trek copyright, and the massive size and costs of the project unfortenately mean that it isn't really "fair use" anymore.

Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if the court side stepped the entire issue. For all we know this amicus brief will be thrown out as immaterial. Somehow I doubt the court is going to take a brief from an online community of amateurs as having serious academic value.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Copyright protection extends to a description, explanation, or illustration of
an idea or system, assuming that the requirements of copyright law are met.
Copyright in such a case protects the particular literary or pictorial expression
chosen by the author. But it gives the copyright owner no exclusive rights in the
idea, method, or system involved.

Note the first section.



Actually that's a terrible explanation XD Give me a minute here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
A conlang is like any other piece of fiction. If it exists as a product of the author, the author(s) owns it unless they give up that right. I honestly don't think there is a more straight forward way to explain it... It's creation as an expression of artistic creativity is not negated by third parties repeating it anymore than a play ceases to belong to its playright because someone can recite it. The character of Legolas is copyrighted, but that does not extend to copyrights on the combination of letters spelling his name, or the idea of an elf with a bow (and no arrows except when the plot demands it). The Klingons are copyrighted, as in the fictional alien race, but that does not extend to a copyright on proud warrior race guys or face ridges.

However I am aware of no languages that just free float outside of public domain. Sindarin is part of a larger narrative work, and can be protected as part of the larger works IP. Klingon as well can be connected to a larger narrative work. The languages themselves might not be copyrighted in and of themsleves, but the languages simply falling under IP protection laws as part of a larger work?

 LordofHats wrote:

The other major hurdle would be that systems are expressly not eligible for copyright. And any linguist will confirm that a language is a system.

And? Windows is a system. A crappy, buggy, spyware laden system, but it's a system and its copyrighted. So is Steam. So is Amazon's weird little method of taking product photos bizarrely. Being a "system" has nothing to do with copyright. Linguists are likely to split on whether or not conlangs actually constitute language. In fact, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), tags conlangs as "art." Notably for this discussion, Klingon is not one of them! It is simply tagged as "tlh."

Copyright does not cover what one might call plagiarism. It does not stop anyone from producing another work that functions similarly. What protects Windows is not copyright, it's trade secrets: Microsoft has no legal or moral right to stop somebody else from writing their own operating system that does everything that Windows does, and they cannot claim copyright just because their source code that does X would produce the same (or similar) machine code as Microsoft's source code that does X. Similarly, you cannot use copyright to protect a language. You can stop somebody from copying your specific English-to-Klingon dictionary as a work of art, but you can't use copyright to stop them creating an English-to-Klingon dictionary which by its nature has to be similar to yours.

Plagiarism is by definition copyright infringement (literally, that's what plagiarism is). As I tried to analogize above, I can copyright a book, or a specific computer program, or a table top game system, but those copyright's don't extend to baring anyone else from making anything similar or even using some of the same mechanics (as Wizards of the Coast recently learned in their lawsuit against Cryptozoic Entertainment, which ended in settlement). A copyright on a book, or TV series, include a copyright on the characters, setting, and elements of the story. I can't write a book set in Middle Earth about Gimli unless Chris Tolken lets me*, but I can write a book set in Mid-Earth about a dwarf named Ilmig if I want to and Christ Tolkein could maybe try but who knows how far he'd get. A fictional language, created as part of a fictional universe, falls under the same copyright protection as Captain Kirk, the United Federation of Planets, or the Star Trek Universe. The issue is that I'd argue Paramount didn't create the language currently known as Klingon, but I don't think there's any argument that J.R.R. Tolkein didn't invent Sindarin, or Marain by Ian Banks.

Copyright can't be used to protect a language, but it can be used to protect artistic expression and I think you'll have a very hard time convincing anyone that a fictional language created by a tv studio, author, or webcomic artist isn't a product of that person(s) artistic expression.

We're not talking about English or French.

*Well, I could write it but distributing it is a legal gray area, and selling it would most certainly be a no no.

If I understand the Tolkien versus Paramount argument, it says that Tolkien invented -- or artistically created -- Sindarin while Paramount didn't invent or create Klingon because it was gradually accreted over years by numerous fans of the series and can't be said to have any single or identifiable group of creators.