Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: A Klingon Language Hypothetical Scenario

I would say that it’s inconceivable that this is the 16th entry in an ongoing series on Star Trek’s future and fandom, but then you might say I don’t know what the word ‘inconceivable’ means.

The Axanar lawsuit has gotten additional press since Friday. Peter Decherney in Forbes has an excellent article going into both the legal issues and the corporate strategy. Perhaps because of this, some lawyers I know have been sharing links on social media.

I mentioned to one of them that, while I was sure CBS/Paramount can easily lay claim to some or even a lot of the intellectual property (IP) of Star Trek, I didn’t see how they could claim ownership of a language. The best I could guess was that the CBS/Paramount legal team felt that the language was invented as a work for hire and so therefore any and all copyrights belonged to CBS/Paramount.

One lawyer mentioned that it wasn’t a work-for-hire issue at all. The question was whether an invented language can be owned by anyone… or if it’s simply in the public domain. Then they added, “That will be $650, please.”

Ah, lawyer humor.

Now based on my admittedly rusty studies of linguistics and geek knowledge regarding the development of the Klingon language, I would not think an invented language could be owned by anyone. However, this caused me to concoct a hypothetical scenario which I’ll share here.

First, I should mention that –in our discussion– Esperanto came up as a prime example of a constructed language. However, the inventor wanted the language to be spread freely so it could be used as a universal “auxiliary” language.

So let’s say a definite for-profit corporation like General Dynamics decides they want to invent their own language for training films distributed across the globe. They decide a special invented language will be easier for their worldwide engineers to learn than learning English and misunderstanding English idioms. (This, incidentally, is one of the arguments for Esperanto and other ‘universal’ languages as many of you are no doubt aware). So linguists are contacted, a language is constructed, and the work-for-hire completed.

The General Dynamics language proves to be very popular among engineers outside the original General Dynamics project for which it was invented. General Dynamics has no problem with this. General Dynamics also has no problem with a non-profit language institute being created to promote and build upon this invented language — even charging money to teach classes in learning the invented language. The original inventor of the language is regularly consulted about the language and new points of grammar usage and vocabulary are defined without any input from General Dynamics.

These activities –the teaching of the language and the expansion of the language– go on for at least TWO DECADES. Now General Dynamics says they control the language and no one can use it without their say so. I don’t think General Dynamics has a case. The language is no longer proprietary nor have they tried to make it so.

Now I am not a lawyer (though I have played one in instructional videos), but as someone who’s studied language, I think this makes sense.

Real lawyers are welcome to chime in.

Update: 2016-05-18:
While lawyers haven’t chimed in per se, many observers of the Axanar case have chimed in during my search down the rabbit hole, so I have a new blog post about their argument that Klingon is owned by CBS/Paramount and all these new additions to the Klingon language amount to derivative works.