Do You Own Your Native Language?

l2718 writes "In a new take on the reach of 'Intellectual Property,' the Mapuche Indians of Chile are accusing Microsoft of linguistic piracy. Their lawsuit alleges that Microsoft needed permission from the tribal elders before translating its software into Mapuzugun, a project which was co-ordinated with the Chilean Ministry of Education." From the CNN Money article: "The Mapuche took their case to a court in the southern city of Temuco earlier this month but a judge ruled it should be considered in Santiago. A judge in the capital is due to decide in the next two weeks whether Microsoft has a case to answer. 'If they rule against us we will go to the Supreme Court and if they rule against us there we will take our case to a court of human rights,' said Lautaro Loncon, a Mapuche activist and coordinator of the Indigenous Network, an umbrella group for several ethnic groups in Chile."

Comments

I belive the problem REALLY resides in

[antikristian]

the tribal people beeing pissed about having to actually pay money for something they used to get for free. I
 
belive it will be easier to get easy access to pirated versions of english and spanish windows versions, now they suddently have to pay for it? AND IT'S NOT THE PROFFESSIONAL EDITION?

I know how bad things are here in Norway, and people here can easily afford to pay for a version of Windows.

call me pretencious (I am sure I did not spell that correctly, and I hope it means what i think it means) But what if these people can not afford to buy the new windows version? I probably would know more about this if i bothered to RTFA (there, now even I have said RTFA, I am so hip)

The Third World

[Vinegar Joe]

Dumb and dumber.