Hallo!

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 19:14 M.S. Soderquist wrote:

> Karen Badham wrote:
> > I have a lot of the same questions the others here have. Is this part of
> > a larger artistic project (a novel for example)? Do you plan to make
> > money from the conlang? If the answer to both of those is no I would
> > honestly recommend not seeking any sort of copyright.
> >
> > Speaking from personal experience, you won't have that many people
> > interested in looking at your conlang stuff anyway. You will probably get
> > readers from this list, or other conlang forms, and perhaps a few family
> > and friends that have a linguistic interest, but otherwise you will
> > likely fly under the radar. Those that would steal your work and call it
> > there own simply don't seem to target conlangers. Unlike other "internet"
> > art (drawing, fanfiction, etc) we simply aren't popular enough.
>
> This is true. I put a Creative Commons license on Teliya Nevashi to
> *encourage* people to borrow it, under the condition that I get some of
> the credit if they do take it and expand/improve/remix it. I suppose a
> big "Take Me" graphic in the header would communicate the point more
> clearly, but there just isn't enough there for people to do much with
> now, and only a few people ever look at it at all. I have stories in my
> head that go with the imaginary places where Teliya Nevashi and ea-luna
> are spoken, but they aren't getting published, so that hardly counts.
>
> Most of the audience for conlangs seems to consist of people who already
> have their own conlangs, so they don't really need to beg, borrow, or
> steal one. It's cool to see more commercial conlangs (as in movies) out
> there, but the average conlang on the web remains an interest for the few.

I have been thinking about which license to choose for my conlangs
several times, with little result.  I don't have any hope of making
a buck publishing them, but maybe I'll some day get some stories set
in the world of the British Elves published (none are even written
yet, though, even if I have a few ideas for them).  So far, Old Albic
and Germanech reside on FrathWiki, which is under a Creative Commons
license, but I am planning to put more extensive documentation of
these conlangs on my own website.

What regards theft of conlangs, that is not a frequent offense, though
some conlangs are at least very derivative of others, and I know of
at least one case of somebody trying to pass other peoples' conscripts
as her own (ZBB members certainly know what I am talking about).

As far as I know, the question whether *languages* can be legally
protected (as opposed to *descriptions* of languages, which certainly
can!) is an open one, but of the TLI vs. LLG case, what I have heard
was that the Loglan Institute's position (that the language was
protected) was defeated in court.

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