In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [76]
He decided to organize some local user groups where people who were interested in Loglan could get together and brainstorm, coordinate projects, and help each other learn the language. He began to contact people; Brown had given him a few names, and he found some others in old Loglan publications. Someone directed him to Nora, who was still an institute member (she had sent in a second five-hundred-dollar donation in 1984, so her membership was paid up for at least a decade) and lived not too far away in Philadelphia. They talked on the phone for hours, and a few weeks later she came down for a visit so they could work together on updating a Loglan flash-card program she had written. When Bob asked the former editor of the institute newsletter, which hadn't come out in about a year, for some addresses of other Loglanists, the editor sent him the entire mailing list. Bob used it to mail out an update on the work he and Nora were doing, and issued a rallying cry for other Loglanists who were near each other to establish their own working groups. From some of the members who were no longer active, he collected half-completed computer programs and bits of other work and started recruiting volunteers to revive these projects.
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.