What happens when someone claims ownership over an alphabet or an entirely new language? Revisiting a little-known 1958 government opinion, Anshika Tripathi examines the limits of copyright and asks whether the law can ever protect the building blocks of communication. Anshika is a recent B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) graduate from Government Law College, DAVV, Indore. Her interests lie in intellectual property, consumer protection, and the intersection of law and technology. She was also a participant at the SpicyIP Summer School 2026.
Who Owns the Tools of Expression? A Copyright Question Across Time
By Anshika Tripathi
We say India is full of cultural and linguistic diversity, and surely not just languages but also dialects. I live in Bundelkhand. After around 45km from where I live begins Bhaghelkhand, the phonetics and the vocabulary change drastically. Language is an open-source, fluid, ever evolving. But what if I told you I sat in my room and made a completely new language from scratch and now, I want to own it?
You’d probably laugh. The Government of India certainly did in 1958. I was assisting Lokesh with some of his work when he shared a very intriguing archive, which took me to 1958. Continuing with his usual “history of present” questionnaires, I knew the intent was not just to read what the past holds but how it makes sense today. The archive was obviously an old, digitally dusty vintage-looking paper purporting that in 1958, just a year after the Copyright Act of 1957 came into force, an unusual request landed before the Government of India. A firm named Globe Trading Company wrote to the Ministry of Scientific Research & Cultural Affairs claiming that an artist had invented a new type of letters in the Telugu language. The claim was ambitious; as they argued, it deserved protection under the Copyright Act. But copyright protection on the alphabet, a strange claim, isn’t it?
The question before the Ministry of Scientific Research & Cultural Affairs in consultation with the Ministry of Law was a curious one: Can a newly invented alphabet be registered as a copyrighted work?
What did the Ministry Say?
Under the 1957 code, section 13(1) protected literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works. The authorities concluded that “the alphabet could not be certainly treated as a literary work.” But why? Let’s see in a while… Though the possibility of treating the letters as “artistic works” was considered, which includes drawings. However, the view taken was cautious: letters of an alphabet, even if original in form, could not readily be regarded as drawings for copyright protection. Thus, the final response rejected registration under the Copyright Act. It suggested that if the applicant claimed to have “invented” a new type, recourse might lie under patent or design law instead.
This is not a situation where copyright law is simply waiting for the right case to decide whether constructed languages deserve protection. It is a case of the mechanism itself being unfit for the question. Copyright protects expression not the systems that make expression possible i.e. ideas and a constructed language, no matter how painstakingly built, it functions as a system: a grammar, a phonology, an orthography that a user must adopt before they can say anything at all. This is precisely the logic of the merger doctrine (where an idea and its expression collapse into each other) and the scènes à faire principle (where certain elements are so intrinsic to a form of expression that they cannot be separated from it) withdraw protection rather than grant one author a monopoly over the only ways of expressing that idea i.e. it “cannot be protected, lest one author own the idea itself.” (see here) A language’s grammar won’t be incidental to speaking; it is scènes à faire for that language. The 1958 Ministry seemed to sense this instinctively when it called the alphabet “a means of expression, not expression itself”.
Breaking Down the Languages
Before going further, some context on what exactly we are talking about. Linguists split languages into two categories: natlangs and conlangs, natural languages are the ones I am writing right now, which evolve with time, and constructed languages, well, it’s like, one day somebody sat down in their living room and decided to make a language from scratch. Hey! Wait, where are you going? It’s not as simple as it sounds. It is not a weekend hobby; conlangers spend years, sometimes decades, working out phonetics, syntax, and semantics. The earliest known conlang dates to roughly 1150–1200 CE, when Hildegard of Bingen created Lingua Ignota, Latin for “unknown language.”
Could Conlangs be Protected?
Let’s now see how copyright has expanded to a pathway where copyrighting a language is also becoming a thing. Three separate disputes, across three technologies and two jurisdictions, arrive at this conclusion that copyright doesn’t protect the building blocks that make expression possible in the first place, but only what’s built from them. The first one is in a US court in Paramount Pictures Corp. v. Axanar Productions, Inc. (2016) the hot-button issue referred to as the Klingon controversy, arose in the context of a fan-made film, where the use of the language became an act of infringement of copyright over the Klingon Language. The defendants argued that a language cannot be owned, for it is a system of communication, and why would one be allowed to copyright the building blocks of idea and expression in itself? We did not get a clear answer here, as the Court did not issue a definitive ruling on whether Klingon, as a language, was protectable or not because the case was settled between the parties. However, the Language Creation Society, in its (scathing, as I would say) amicus curiae brief, said that (by specifically mentioning references directly from the series) it would not take a Vulcan to explain their logic – even the Pakleds would know that nobody can “own” a language. Creativity, especially in language, works in a much more continuous and interconnected way. If it cannot be used freely, it ceases to function as a language at all. And of course, a language derives its meaning not from its creator’s intention (if it does have one), but from its usage/adoption by a community of users. None of this changes simply because a language was constructed rather than natural, the moment it enters circulation, it becomes subject to reinterpretation, variation, and evolution. A language holds an infinitely generative capacity through communication, cultural impact, and further creativity to exist. In Hindi itself, something as simple as saying “yes” isn’t fixed, it shifts with cultural refinements like haan, ho, hao, and so on, reflecting their social and cultural shades. And these aren’t exceptions to the rule of the language, but this is how a language evolves. Any attempt to control its use is therefore not merely legally problematic but also practically impossible. The Klingon debate sharpened the same fault line in copyright law that appeared in the 1958 archival exchange.
What About Typeface and Fonts?
Second is typeface and fonts (I couldn’t help but say “digitalisation of the issue”). Indian authorities settled this in Re Anand Expanded Italics, holding that fonts and the artistic design of typefaces (the visual shape of letters) do not enjoy copyright protection. The Coyright Board provided two main reasons for that, one being the utilitarian nature of letters and the other by taking restrictive interpretation of the term “artistic work.” The Board treated typefaces as functional systems of representation rather than autonomous artistic expression, thereby concluding that typefaces fall outside the scope of copyright protection. And now its comparison to conlangs is closer than it first appeared and arguably stronger. A typeface is one option among many for writing a letter, a conlang’s grammar is the only option for saying anything in that language at all. If utilitarian necessity is the basis for denying typefaces protection, that same necessity is present here too.
What About Codes?
The third one, is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (2021). Google used approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the Java SE platform to build the Android operating system. Basically, Application Programming Interface (APIs) are mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. Oracle contended that these were creative expressions protected by copyright. Conversely, Google argued, and the Court agreed, that these lines were functional requirements, essential for programmes to “speak” the language. The Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Breyer, distinguished “declaring code” from “implementing code,” noting that the former is “inextricably bound together with uncopyrightable ideas” and the “accrued talents” of the programmers who use it. The Court further emphasised that the value of the declaring code derived significantly from the “investment of users (here computer programmers) who have learned the API’s system,” thereby placing the material “further than are most computer programs.. from the core of copyright” allowing a single entity to own these functional “labels” would turn the code into a “lock limiting the future creativity of new programs,” to which one company would “alone hold the key.” This is precisely the 1958 Ministry’s reasoning and sixty years later, in a different country, for a different medium.
There’s a further problem with the claim, independent of any statue, under incentive theory, as Michael Adelman also pointed out, that the exclusive rights of copyright are awarded by the governments as an incentive to spur the creation and dissemination of creative works of public value, as opposed to “rewarding the labor of authors” (also see here) and thus not everything which has an author is protected. If the law focuses too heavily on protecting individual ownership without considering its shared and evolving space, that’s gonna impact the ongoing cycle of creativity badly.
Who Gets to Claim the Copyright (if any)?
And the next issue isn’t on grounds of law at all but who actually gets to claim a right (copyright) before the court. The Tolkien Estate has publicly asserted copyright over Tolkien’s Elvish languages, claiming on its own FAQ page that they are “original literary and artistic works.. therefore qualify for copyright protection in most (if not all) jurisdictions worldwide.” No court has tested that claim, but it has not needed to be tested to have an effect: in one instance, a writer who had used Elvish language in their own work received a notice alleging infringement and rather than face the cost of litigating against a well-resourced estate,he withdrew the work instead. A comparable claim arose in 2012, when the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre asked Wikipedia to delete its article on palawa kani, asserting ownership over the constructed language, but Wikipedia declined. The difference in these two cases wasn’t the strength of either underlying claim, both rested on equally unsettled law. It was that Wikipedia, an institutional actor with counsel and no commercial stake in the outcome, could afford to refuse but the individual writer on the other hand, could not. That asymmetry, not the law, is where indeterminate law gets quietly administered as if it were settled ownership.
Conclusion
Under Indian law, Section 13(1) protects literary and artistic works however, the grammar, phonology, and orthography of a conlang are scènes à faire to any expression made in that language, and the merger doctrine bars ownership of the only means available for saying something in it. Re Anand Expanded Italics already pulls back Indian law to treat functional systems of representation as falling outside “artistic work”. Nor, as the incentive theory already shows, does the claim survive on policy grounds either. The position then is not that Indian law is unsettled on conlangs, its that copyright as currently structured under Section 13(1) was never built to answer this question and no amount of stretching of its scope in terms of analogising a grammar to a “drawing” or a lexicon to a “compilation” will make it fit. If conlangs deserve protection at all, that protection has to come from outside copyright altogether, if there’s any.
In no area of law is it a secret that giants find gaps and then it becomes the common practice as if the system was created with that very intent. The danger here was never that some corporation might someday “own” a language. It is that indeterminate law is already being administered as determinate ownership: a cease-and-desist sent, a fear response, a case settled before a court, is forced to say the thing out loud. The asymmetry, not the law itself, is where the real cost of this uncertainty is paid and it is paid by exactly the people least able to test a proprietary claim in court.
