Willful ignorance? I think not.
Willful ignorance is the malady plaguing anyone who doesn't yet see Alec Peters for the flickerpiss nosescum of fandom (and society in general, really) that he has always been.
Here's your problem, Karzak: you assume in this post (as in other posts) that anyone who disagrees with you (or CBS) about
any element of the Axanar case has swallowed the Axanar line hook, line, and sinker. It's no less black-and-white for you, according to your posts, than it is for Alec -- one is either A Good Guy (which is proved by showing nothing less than
absolute loyalty to what you imagine to be the party line), or a Hater (or, as you have it here, an "insane deluded person"). Your most recent post is neither less dogmatic nor less stupid nor less offensive than one of Alec's many infamous posts; it's just going the opposite direction.
As I have made clear elsewhere in this thread, I support CBS/P, agree that they have a strong case, and concur in the general judgment that Axanar is going down and had it coming. I also have made it clear that CBS/P does not own a copyright on the Klingon language -- and CBS/P is not even
asserting, at least at this stage in the lawsuit, that it owns a copyright on the Klingon language, as they made clear in their most recent filing, so my position does not conflict with CBS/P's. I have been happy to lurk for the past several months while this thread grows and grows, but I came out of the lurk closet when I started seeing people go astray on this point.
I invite you to read some of those posts, or the Copyright Act, and then say something intelligent about either, as muCephi and Jespah have done. They speak in friendly but well-informed disagreement (which I think we have, through conversation and mutual correction, largely figured out together -- correct me if I'm wrong, guys). You insist on throwing around snide remarks without a fact in sight.
I don't know if the law SAYS otherwise. That is an interpretation. Until there is an actual trial involving a fictional language regarding copyright, I don't think there is any certainty. Just opinion.
Has there been a copyright case involving a fictional language yet? is there precedent?
A fair point! It is true that there is no binding precedent in a court of law on this yet. The
amicus brief relates the case that came closest to dealing with it, but even that was only tangentially connected:
No court has squarely addressed the issue of whether a constructed spoken language is entitled to copyright protection. The only known prior litigation of constructed languages was in Loglan Inst., Inc. v. Logical Language Group, Inc., 962 F.2d 1038 (Fed. Cir. 1992), which was an appeal of a trademark cancellation. That case centered on a constructed language called Loglan that its creator, Dr. James Brown, intended to be “symbolic logic made speakable.” Id. at 1039. He created an institute to promote the language, which registered the mark “Loglan” for “Dictionaries and Grammars” in 1988. Id. at 1040. A splinter group later formed and published a newsletter that made several references to Loglan, and was threatened by the Loglan institute with a trademark infringement suit. See id. The splinter group then successfully petitioned the TTAB to cancel the registration for “Loglan” because the term was generic for the Loglan language. Id. The Federal Circuit affirmed the cancellation, finding the term to be generic because it was commonly used to refer to a specific language. See id. at 1041-42.
So there is a certain amount of uncertainty here, because no court has ruled on it. But it's not a very large amount of uncertainty. It's like if my state passed a law against using the phone while driving, with an exception for looking up directions while stopped at a stop light. Until that law is actually tested in court, you can't be
completely sure how a court is going to interpret it... but, if somebody gets a ticket for using the phone at a stop light, and produces texts showing that he was asking his friend for directions, you can be
pretty sure the court is going to kill the ticket, because there just aren't a lot of other plausible interpretations on offer.
By the same token, we can be pretty sure a court isn't going to uphold a copyright on the Klingon language, because there just aren't a lot of plausible interpretations where the language is, in and of itself, a "literary work... fixed in a tangible medium of expression," and not a "system, concept, idea, procedure, or process." You'll note that, thus far, nobody in this thread has even tried to suggest such an interpretation; defenses of a putative CBS/P copyright on Klingon have instead depended on misunderstandings of other parts of the Copyright Act (like the "work made for hire" clause) or, as in the above post, simple bluster and insults.
Bravo.
Its only been a few days since you wrote a very detailed response to my last post, and I have been trying to digest it amidst other things going on.
