Watching three fictional physicists and an engineer sitting around in an episode of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory playing Klingon Boggle is one thing but writing a legal brief in the fictional language?
It turns out that The Language Creation Society, based in California, has done just that. The society, they state, is dedicated to preserving and recognizing what they call “constructed languages”. Apparently, there is huge copyright battle going on at the moment in Hollywood. It involves both Paramount Pictures and CBS, who own the rights to all of the Star Trek properties, and an independent film maker who looks to make his own Star Trek movie independently with funding he received through a crowd funding effort.
The brief, written by the society for the court in this case, is a sincere effort to convince the court that a language belonging to a fictional extraterrestrial race from a fictional television and movie franchise is an actual language worthy of the court’s recognition. To them, and others, it is a “living” language and therefore real. If the studios win, it will, for the most part, end any attempt at fan created Star Trek films.
The film makers have released a short trailer for their creation and there is some Klingon spoken in it thus the lawsuit from CBS and Paramount. The studios are aware that the independent production company wants to make a film dealing with copyrighted property that they legally own and look to stop it all. The film maker’s argument is that the Klingon language has now been loosed all over the world and is a living and breathing language that no one can lay claim to owning anymore.
The language was actually developed by Marc Okrand of the University of California back in the early 1970’s to be used in the third Star Trek film, The Search for Spock, that was featuring the Klingons. Okrand is a professor of linguistics and actually constructed the Klingon in the fashion and structure of any world language currently spoken around the world today. There is proper structure and grammar and an actual vocabulary. One can even wander out onto YouTube and call up a tutorial on how to speak Klingon.
For the film makers to win the day, they must somehow prove that Klingon is universal and can’t be copyrighted.
PHOTO SOURCES: Alexander Mark / Hubpages; Mycomicshop.com