Over Labor Day weekend, Bob hosted the first annual Logfest at his house. About ten people showed up with sleeping bags, but not much sleeping went on, as they stayed up all night snacking on cold cuts, hashing out ideas, and trying to see how far they could go with live Loglan conversation (not very far, it turned out, but it was a start). They also did a detailed group review of a revised description of the language that Brown had asked one of them to have a look at. Bob put together a complete report of everything that had been accomplished over the summer, more than a hundred pages of comments and materials, and, with a rush of exhilarated pride, mailed it to Brown, who was due back any day from his sailing adventure.
When Brown did get back, about a week later, he exploded in fury, yelling at Bob over the phone, accusing him of stealing the mailing list, of making a power grab. “I told you to work on the dictionary! I didn’t tell you to contact anyone! I didn’t tell you to review that draft.” He accused Bob of consorting with “enemies” and “fomenting a revolt.” Bob, flattened with bewildered disappointment, struggled to explain that he was only trying to be helpful, and spent the next four hours apologizing. At the end of their discussion, he was back in Brown’s good graces, but very tenuously so.
And not for long. When Bob and Nora finished the flash-card program (they had been spending more and more time together), they told Brown they were planning to distribute it as shareware on a computer bulletin board so that other Loglanists could take advantage of it. Brown informed them they would do no such thing. Loglan was the property of the institute. He would consider letting them distribute the program only if they signed a statement of acknowledgment that the institute owned the copyrights to the language and agreed to pay the institute royalties.
Bob wasn’t so sure anyone owned the rights to the language, or what that would mean in practical terms, and his own research into copyright law indicated that if he tested Brown’s claims legally, they wouldn’t hold up. He didn’t want to have to test them, he explained in a series of letters, but he wouldn’t sign any agreement. Through the first few months of 1987 the conflict escalated, with Brown demanding that Bob resign from the project (“Sorry it hasn’t worked out for you, Bud”) and Bob refusing (“If I can’t find a way to work around our dispute, I will take up the gauntlet you have thrown down, Don Q. But I’m not a windmill and neither are you”). Though Bob had initially agreed that some type of legal protection for Loglan was necessary in order to give the language a chance to stabilize (he just thought the members who were working on it should be given more freedom with it), as the argument grew more heated, he transformed into a sort of Loglan public-domain crusader. In his view, the only way to advance the language was to give it to the users and let them run with it. His position slowly crystallized into a mission: he would bring this creation to life, even if it meant going against the will of the creator himself.
In March, Bob proposed to Nora in Loglan and she accepted. In April, when Bob ordered some Loglan materials for the class he was teaching, Brown sent his check back. Orders would only be filled for those who signed an “Aficionado Agreement” with a “non-disclosure” clause. When Bob explained to his students what had happened, one of them asked whether they could get around the copyright problem by just making up their own words and substituting them into Loglan sentences. Could they? It was worth a try.
On Memorial Day weekend Bob drove to Philadelphia to help Nora pack up her things and move her into his house in Fairfax, where two of his Loglan-interested friends were visiting. The four of them spent the rest of the weekend laying out a system for creating the new vocabulary, and Bob and Nora then spent their first summer together generating great heaps of paper in their “relexification” of Loglan, which they called Loglan-88. In August they hosted the second Logfest, where the attendees voted on whether it was worth splitting up this already small community in order to have the freedom to do what they wanted. They decided it was, 18–0.
Still, the split was not complete. Bob considered himself to be working on Loglan—Brown’s language—and he still held out hope for the possibility of reconciliation. In October, Bob and Nora married. On their honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg, in a demonstration of their commitment both to Loglan and to each other, they sustained a two-hour Loglan conversation. Most of it was spent trying to establish that each had understood what the other one said, as good a foundation for a marriage as any.
Upon their return, Bob redoubled his efforts toward his mission. He announced Loglan-88 at a science fiction convention, collected new recruits, and started putting out his own newsletter. A few weeks into 1988, “Jim had fifty Aficionados, and I had a mailing list of three hundred.” In March, he received a letter from Jim, notifying him that he was in violation of Loglan’s trademark (to be registered shortly) and that, should he not cease such violation, he risked being sued “for the recovery of profits, damages and costs, with, as you may know, the possibility of treble damages and attorney’s fees.”
With that letter, the gauntlet had been irretrievably thrown. Loglan-88 was officially renamed Lojban (from the new words logji, “logic,” and bangu, “language”), and the Lojbanists incorporated their own, competing (nonprofit) organization, the Logical Language Group (LLG). A year later, the LLG challenged the Loglan trademark. After almost two years of motions and counter-motions, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the trademark should be canceled. A few months later, Brown filed an appeal, and the case went to trial before the federal circuit court. Bob hadn’t seen Brown for six years, and hadn’t had any direct communication with him for five, when they finally came together in a courtroom in 1992. But no words would be exchanged, not even a glance. “I’d never been snubbed so completely,” Bob told me. “He refused to look at me, like I didn’t exist.” Brown lost the appeal.
Can a person own a language? The law is still not really clear on that. The Loglan case did not settle the matter; it said only that the word “Loglan” could not be trademarked because at the time the trademark was filed (over thirty years after Brown had coined the word) it was already in general use as a “common descriptive term.” (The Loglan case would later be cited in a judgment against Harley-Davidson when the motorcycle company claimed that another company’s use of “hog” to mean “motorcycle” was trademark infringement.) The Lojbanists were free to use the word “Loglan” to describe their project (though they continued to call it Lojban).
There is much more to a language, of course, than its name. At the beginning of the dispute (but not in court), Brown claimed he owned the rights to the vocabulary of Loglan. Did he? Brown did have copyrights on his books, including the dictionary. But copyright does not extend to each individual word in a copyrighted work, only to the particular configuration of the words. Would it have been possible for him to copyright each Loglan word sepa-rately? Perhaps, but he didn’t; to do so would have been too costly and time-consuming (and useless, since the Lojbanists had already made their own words). In any case, such a strategy for language ownership has never been attempted, and it is not clear what the law would have to say about it if challenged in court.