tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 16 08:28:07 2003
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Re: Klingon and copyright
- From: "Lawrence Schoen" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Klingon and copyright
- Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 06:23:38 -0700
>I really don't forsee Paramount objecting to such usage, at
>least for small educational films of a short variety online,
>unless they're completely greed-centric, which I don't see
>either.
It's not *all* about greed (or as I'm sure they prefer to describe it, "profit"); there are other factors. And speaking as the person who has gone toe to toe with Paramount in the past, I can tell you that this is a case of guilty until proven innocent, and that Paramount would object as a matter of course.
When dealing with giant corporations and their teams of lawyers, one chooses the battles very carefully.
>Exactly how would an onscreen version of the translated Hamlet
>fit into the license agreement the KLI has with Paramount? I
>realize it would depend on whether or not the sets were Klingon
>in design, and the characters as well, but generally speaking?
That's actually quite complicated, and I'm not at liberty to discuss the particulars. I'm sorry if that sounds like a cop-out, but welcome to the world of lawyers and licenses.
>As far as the former is concerned, sign me up! I'm willing to do
>anything I can to help, even though I may not know a lot about
>the language, I can be useful. ;-)
Mitchell, you mentioned certain graphic skills, and I'll be contacting you by private email to further explore those.
As enthusiastic as some people on this list might be to the notion of an online film, even if such a thing were possible and done, it wouldn't accomplish our goal, specifically to bring people to the language. Why not? Because they wouldn't know it was there, so they wouldn't know to go look at it.
A more practical approach, and one that we've been engaged in for the past few years, has been to attract existing Klingon fans with eye-catching postcards which bring them to the website.
Of course, if we had a short film of a scene from HAMLET or some such to greet them when they arrived, that would be better still. But the trick is getting them here.
>What about a joint venture? A proposal where Paramount would
>work with the KLI for a feature-length film? Paramount could
>take care of sets and props, and the KLI could be the linguistic
>consulting firm, etc, etc, you get the idea. Might that be
>possible, with proper honey-lined words?
I've got the honey and the lining, but it won't matter. For years we've offered our services to each of the television shows, to provide accurate Klingon dialogue as needed. The offer has usually gone unacknowledged, and has never been accepted. What you propose requires even more effort on Paramount's part, and that just ain't going to happen.
On the brighter side, our relationship with the editors and authors at Pocket Books has never been better. Quite a few authors have already used the KLI to get their Klingon correct in more than a dozen novels. And, over this past weekend, I cemented relations with several more authors who will be coming to us to make sure they get the language right.
Lawrence