Can Copyright Protect a Language?

[Commentary] With the rumors about the third Star Trek film starting to fly, it’s high time to talk about how the Supreme Court is about to rule on whether it is illegal to speak Klingon. You may have heard of the case Oracle v. Google, a clash of software titans ongoing for the last five years. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take on the case, and the Department of Justice filed a significant brief siding with Oracle and recommending leaving intact the decision of the appeals court in Oracle’s favor (though the government is perhaps not fully united on this, as one recent article suggests). Many are describing this case as involving a very technical issue of “copyrightability of application programming interfaces, or APIs.” But the implications for sci-fi argot are perhaps less widely discussed. And though the effect on jurisprudence for alien languages will presumably not be terribly widespread outside a fictional universe, the wrong result will have real and serious consequences for the nonfiction world, potentially cutting off decades of innovation in all sorts of industries.

According to Oracle, copyright can protect a language and prevent others like Google from speaking it. That’s the connection of the Oracle v. Google case to Klingon and other constructed languages like Esperanto or Lojban: If broadly read, the ruling against Google, which is where the case currently stands, could also deem the speaking of such languages to be copyright infringement. And it’s not just the linguists and Trekkies who should be concerned. Invented languages are the foundation of all sorts of innovation. Most prominently, computer networking technology depends on languages, like the Wi-Fi protocol, so that multiple computers can communicate and understand one another. Those protocols also include formally defined commands (vocabularies) and rules of operation and syntax (grammars), making them languages almost exactly on par with the Java API. Other fields, such as medicine, engineering, and sports, rely on well-known jargon for efficient communication of specialized concepts. According to one Klingon proverb: “Ending a battle to save an Empire is no defeat.” By deciding to take the Oracle v. Google case and to reject Oracle’s misguided view of copyright, the Supreme Court may end Oracle’s software battle, but it will save an empire of industries built on sharing and freedom of communication, on interoperability based on common languages. That, certainly, would be no defeat.

[Charles Duan is the director of the Patent Reform Project at Public Knowledge]