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There is a difference between the copyright standard of the language itself (which may not be a copyrightable thing, though the court left that for future court

There is a difference between the copyright standard of the language itself (which may not be a copyrightable thing, though the court left that for future courts to decide in the given case) and the copyright standard of custom glyphs used by that language though. The custom glyphs themselves to "write" the language are artistic design elements usually recognized to have some copyright protections as with any works of art. (There's also further protections in they way they are often used that sometimes trademark protections also may be applied and looser defined "trade dress" protections as well. Aurebesh, the custom glyphs of Star Wars is pretty heavily defended by such protections in commercial projects.) Unfortunately, the sources for the Klingon glyphs are copyrighted movies and fonts owned or commissioned by ViacomCBS and there's not much of an argument to be made that they aren't art designs they own. I believe the same applies to Tengwar that too much of comes from artistic work written and/or commissioned for books still in copyright and owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Perhaps when more of the copyrights expire on these originating works Unicode can revisit them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon. (Even Tengwar isn't expected to expire until 2044, 70 years after JRR Tolkien's death.)

mumblemumble 5y ago
That, and it sounds like this is only covering a case in US copyright law. Unicode potentially has to worry about the rest of the world as well. I can imagine that the Unicode Consortium's general feeling on the subject is outside the scope of their mission, and that pleasing a sci-fi fandom just isn't really worth the potential for headaches, and that it's better to let them continue to rely on ConScript.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  My impression is that once the Astral Plane opened up, there's enough academic reason to want to encode those glyphs as there are certainly some really interesting academic work already using Klingon glyphs or Tengwar or others (I don't know if it is more or less than say Linear A, but it's not a contest), and we do risk losing some of that academic discussion if it isn't reliably encoded in something like Unicode. Academic papers are very clearly carved out in copyright laws as "fair use". Unfortunately to protect fonts as copyrightable a lot of the similar carve outs that should make any and all Unicode encoding of glyphs "fair use" are something of a swiss cheese at the moment, and yeah I don't blame Unicode for feeling that their mission definitely does not include fighting the definition of what should be "fair use" in most of the world.

mumblemumble 5y ago

That, and it sounds like this is only covering a case in US copyright law. Unicode potentially has to worry about the rest of the world as well. I can imagine that the Unicode Consortium's general feeling on the subject is outside the scope of their mission, and that pleasing a sci-fi fandom just isn't really worth the potential for headaches, and that it's better to let them continue to rely on ConScript.

WorldMaker 5y ago
My impression is that once the Astral Plane opened up, there's enough academic reason to want to encode those glyphs as there are certainly some really interesting academic work already using Klingon glyphs or Tengwar or others (I don't know if it is more or less than say Linear A, but it's not a contest), and we do risk losing some of that academic discussion if it isn't reliably encoded in something like Unicode. Academic papers are very clearly carved out in copyright laws as "fair use". Unfortunately to protect fonts as copyrightable a lot of the similar carve outs that should make any and all Unicode encoding of glyphs "fair use" are something of a swiss cheese at the moment, and yeah I don't blame Unicode for feeling that their mission definitely does not include fighting the definition of what should be "fair use" in most of the world.