Yes, so when I assemble a collection of characters to make text, or a collection of musical notes, or a collection of either program codes or transistors, it is just an abstract formation of individual pieces, and in no way can violate a copyright or patent even though it resembles an similar organization of items appearing in the copyright or patent registry.
The letter a is not protected because of its origins. That is not the same as letters in a conlang. Wordsmithing a rationale for the characters being encodable will not prevent a lawsuit from the originator that wants to protect their creation. Tex No AI was used authoring my text From: Unicode [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bill Poser via Unicode Sent: Friday, May 29, 2026 8:43 PM To: unicode Unicode Discussion Subject: Re: Seeming hostility to conlang scripts? The Consortium should indeed act only on the advice of lawyers with expertise in intellectual property law. I will, however, venture to make what I believe is a useful clarification. Much of the information in Unicode is not protected by IP law. That is, the information that the glyph used to write such-and-such a sound in Tengwar has certain properties, which Unicode characterizes in a certain way, is not protected. Unicode could, I believe, without fear of litigation assign codepoints to the glyphs of Tengwar insofar as it could identify them. For instance, the standard could assign a codepoint to "the character that represents the voiceless dental stop in Tengwar" and it could probably also identify that character as the one named "tinco". The form of the glyph, however, may be protected by IP law, and insofar as the Unicode standard needs to depict characters in order to identify them, it may not be possible to add things like Tengwar to the standard without encountering IP problems. By way of comparison, the letter "a" is not protected by IP law. Nobody's permission was needed to include it in Unicode. However, how the form of "a" is depicted could create a problem. If the standard used a glyph from a proprietary font still under copyright, that could lead to copyright trouble. The fonts used in the standard are licensed by their owners for that purpose. So, although abstract identifications are probably unproblematic, depictions of the characters of proprietary writing systems may very well be. On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 6:22 PM Tex via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote: It seems like this discussion comes up every few months. Isn't there a FAQ we can point to, to short circuit these threads? Perhaps there should also be a faq stating that those offering legal opinions should first of all be lawyers, and second of all provide an estimate of the legal costs if their approach is pursued. I say this not to dismiss anyone's opinion but to highlight there is no point in arguing points of law in this list. I doubt the consortium is going to take legal advice from this list or that something that has not already been considered will be revealed here and that legal costs are not inconsiderable and perhaps inestimable. Tex No AI was used authoring my text -----Original Message----- From: Unicode [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell via Unicode Sent: Friday, May 29, 2026 4:48 PM To: [email protected]; [email protected]; Vikki McDonough Subject: RE: Seeming hostility to conlang scripts? stasoid wrote: > Wow, this is a really sad situation. Tolkien Estate's greed already > stifles everything Tolkien-related with copyrights, but here, even on > solid legal ground, Unicode still doesn't want to deal with it because > of bad vibes. It is quite clear that writing systems cannot be > copyrighted, so Tolkien Estate's opinion shouldn't matter. I don’t think it has anything to do with “bad vibes.” In order for an organization like Unicode to take on this legal fight, the grounds would have to be 100.0 percent rock-solid, tested through multiple similar court cases; and even then, the legal costs of pursuing the case could be overwhelming. -- Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org
