Who owns a language? Better yet, who owns the Klingon language?

"Waaait, people don't think we sound sexy?"

To speak Klingon, the language of Star Trek's most notable villain alien species, you need a deep supply of mucus in the throat and a total lack of shame for speaking it in public.

You might also need to go to court to fight over the copyright.

Currently being battled out in federal court is the matter of who exactly owns a language for a fictional alien species, an esoteric mind bender of a geek debate if there ever was one. Does the corporation (Paramount) that owns the artistic rights to the fictional alien species' likeness also own the language, too? Do the fans own it, since they expanded a previously 2,000 word vocabulary into an expansive language numbering in the tens of thousands of words? Or can anything or anyone really own any language in the first place--especially one for a species that doesn't exist?

"This argument is absurd since a language is only useful if it can be used to communicate with people, and there are no Klingons with whom to communicate," stated a brief authored by David Grossman, a lawyer for Paramount, who's adding even more opaque layers to the debate. The old question "If a tree falls in the forest..." has met its match. If no Klingon exists to speak it, does that mean it's not useful? How would the ancient Greeks feel knowing they no longer exist, but people still know and use their language? Who judges worth of use?

Microsoft Bing even has an English-to-Klingon translation tool. Over 250,000 Klingon dictionaries have been sold. There's even a Klingon Language Institute. In the end, can Paramount own the words they sort of never created? Can anyone?

No court in American history has ever ruled the copyrightedness of a language--any language--before. Song lyrics? Poems? Words on a page? They've been touched on by courts. By comparison, the copyright over language as a whole, and the Klingon language specifically, is, well, the final frontier.