[Wikipedia-l] Klingon

Imran Ghory imran at bits.bris.ac.uk
Wed Jun 9 19:21:00 UTC 2004


On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> >is perfectly legal for third parties to produce klingon language
> >documents and redistrbute them under any licence, then we can reconsider.
> >However until that time we should not risk copyright violation and wasting the time of contributors (to the
> >Klingon wikipedia).
> >
> The situation may not be as simple as that.  It opens up the question of
> whether a language can be copyrighted at all.  I suspect that it may be
> patentable in the same way that certain accounting and business
> processes have been patented.  But that's a whole new kettle of fish.

I don't think the general case matters, if Paramount give us permission
that's fine, if they don't then we don't make a klingon wikipedia.
Fighting a legal case over whether languages are copyrightable is not in
the interest of the Wikimedia Foundation IMHO.

Imran
-- 
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran



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