Reddit reviews Secret Fighting Arts of the Warrior Race, Volume 1: betleH yIqel

This is a question that pops up on the Klingon Language Institute's mailing list quite every now and then.

> The question should probably be more along the lines of "would the creator of the language enforce the copyright?" rather than "is the language itself under copyright?"

In the case of Klingon, even the creator (Marc Okrand) is skittish about using the language without CBS' blessing; he doesn't claim ownership of the language, but CBS owns the copyright to a large portion of the language's reference works, such as The Klingon Dictionary, Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, the scripts to various movies, and more.

He still helps us out and provides us with new words on a regular basis, but he doesn't want to touch projects that involve money in any way.

Klingon-speakers tend to operate under the assumption that using the language constitutes fair use, but making and spreading our own reference works based on copyrighted material is more risky. We still do, and CBS is no doubt well aware of this, and I doubt they have any interest in seeking legal recourse. However, we're aware that we have to behave ourselves and not use the language for anything controversial, or they might start putting their foot down (like they did with the martial arts book tonSaw' peghmey, presumably because they didn't want their brand associated with any real-world injuries).

Paramount did once serve the Klingon Language Institute with a cease-and-desist letter, not because they were using the language, but because the trademarked word "Klingon" appeared frequently in their publications (not to mention the organization's name).

However, the KLI now has a special license to use terms such as "Klingon" and "Star Trek", and has published books through Pocket Books, which is owned by the CBS Corporation (and is the primary publisher of written Star Trek materials).

If you're interested in this, I recommend looking into the Lojban vs. Loglan case. However, I don't believe it established any sort of precedent, since the creators of Lojban circumvented the legal threats by creating their own vocabulary, and while the grammar of Lojban and Loglan are very similar, Lojban reference works are written from scratch with no dependency on Loglan reference works.

Secret Fighting Arts of the Warrior Race

Not sure if it has the mok'bara, but it is a martial arts book. Unfortunately it is out of print and a collector's item.