I know of the Axanar flap. I'm not sure that Paramount was *seriously*
saying "we own everything anyone ever says or will say in this
language." What they said was more "you used Klingon in your story, and
Klingon is our language, therefore your story is infringing on our
stuff." So while it's true they *might* make that claim, I don't know
that they *have*.
All of which is neither here nor there; it's something they could say.
The LCS wrote an amicus brief, which is linked to from my document, by
the way, arguing that very point, which the judge dismissed without
prejudice on the grounds that he wasn't going to be addressing that
issue (so he may not have seen it as critical to Paramount's case
either). A claim as bald and universal as the way I worded it above is
practically indefensible logically, intuitively, and legally (Sun
invented Java, but can they claim every Java program???) At any rate,
this isn't Unicode's problem. Unicode would not be creating anything in
Klingon anyway! Just encoding letters used to write it. Now, those
letter-shapes might (for all I know) have legal strings attached, and
what's more, the word "Klingon" is definitely owned and claimed by
Paramount, which might cause problems with naming the block.
Really, though, that isn't what UTC should be deciding. The question is
whether or not to encode pIqaD: is it a writing system that people use
or have used in the past to communicate (that's the main criterion,
right? Unicode is supposed to contain "all" alphabets). If there are
additional issues outside of UTC's purview that raise difficulties,
those will have to be heard and addressed. But decide to act first,
*then* see what obstacles need to be overcome.
~mark
On 11/04/2016 01:41 PM, David Faulks wrote:
On Thu, 11/3/16, Mark Shoulson <[email protected]> wrote:
Subject: The (Klingon) Empire Strikes Back
At the time of writing this letter it has not yet hit the UTC
Document Register, but I have recently submitted a document
revisiting the ever-popular issue of the encoding of Klingon
"pIqaD". The reason always given why it could not be
encoded was that it did not enjoy enough usage, and so I've
collected a bunch of examples to demonstrate that this is not
true (scans and also web pages, etc.) So the issue comes
back up, and time to talk about it again.
There is another issue of course, which I think could be a huge obstacle: the
Trademark/Copyright issue. Paramount claims copyright over the entire Klingon
language (presumably including the script). The issue has recently gone to
court. Encoding criteria for symbols (and this likely extends to letters) is
against encoding them without the permission of the Copyright/Trademark holder.
Is Paramount endorsing your proposal?
<snip>
~mark
David Faulks
