language as property

[ROOD DAVID S]

	When we first began to work on Lakxota 30 years ago, and had in
mind among other things the possible preparation of a dictionary, we
checked on the then-current copyright laws and were informed in absolute
terms that "no one can copyright words".  I don't know whether that has
changed in the meantime or not, but it should be relevant.
	To copyright documents, or the contents of something composed of
words, is of course a different matter, and the ethics of intellectual
property rights are probably even more complex than the legalities.
	In my Wichita experience, what I learned is that traditionally
stories were owned and could be sold by story-tellers (I think songs are
simiilar), but as soon as you paid a story-teller for a story, you, too,
had the right to make further use of it -- in other words, it became yours
to tell further.  But that's a story, not a language -- I do not think
that any resolution such as the one Mark describes would ever be
enforceable legally.  There are cases, however, where a tribe asks or
orders a linguist not to publicize information about the language (though
those attitudes seem to vary as tribal council membership changes); at
that point, the issue of "ownership" is not legal, but moral, it seems to
me.
	You might be interested in the preliminary stages of some attempts
to wrestle with this problem on a world-wide basis from a German
perspective (German law tries to be a lot more precise that
English/American does). Look at
	www.mpi.nl/DOBES/applicants/legal-ethics-issues.html

David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
Campus Box 295
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu