The argument against Wikipedia’s palawa kani page, however, is even more complicated. For one thing, palawa kani is neither an organically developed language nor a completely invented one. It’s part of a 20-year project to reconstruct and unify up to a dozen extinct Tasmanian indigenous languages, of which only fragments have been preserved. In addition to managing palawa kani’s development, the TAC promotes its use within the aboriginal community and sets rules for who can use the language, and what they can do with it.

Further complicating matters, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center (TAC), which filed the complaint, isn’t simply arguing about US or even Australian copyright law. It’s appealing to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which it says allows it control over how the language is used.

TAC language program coordinator Annie Reynolds says that palawa kani should not become available to the general public "until aborigines themselves are familiar and competent with it." A use policy for the language, sent to The Verge, asks any non-aboriginal person or company to submit an official request if they want to use the language for any reason. Words for geographical features, plants, and animals are acceptable, but they draw the line at using them for "farms, office buildings, educational facilities, homes, streets, etc. which have no connection to collective aboriginal values."

Indigenous intellectual property rights have been a topic of research and discussion for decades now. Often, they come up in the context of "biopiracy" — using indigenous medical knowledge to create and patent drugs without informing or compensating the groups behind them. In many cases, they feel intuitively ethical. But they can be difficult to square with existing copyright law.

Shared language is a way to draw boundaries around a threatened community

For one thing, complaints often rely on international treaties that have little bite in national courts. The Wikipedia palawa kani page includes sample text that could be copyrighted, but Reynolds maintains that under UN agreements, the TAC holds rights to not only those phrases but the entire language. She admits, however, that these can’t be legally enforced unless countries adapt them into local law.

Perhaps the most confounding part of these cases is the way they put the most basic ideals of good-intentioned copyright liberals (myself included) to the test. One of the central tenets of copyright is the public domain, a wealth of cultural heritage into which all things must someday pass. Copyright gives someone temporary control over a thing that they create, helping them profit from their work while allowing everyone to eventually adapt, interpret, and even copy it. Before the copyright expires, at least in the US, people can still use "fair use" exemptions to critique and remix pieces of it. Without the public domain, Project Gutenberg couldn’t preserve thousands of old books online. Disney couldn’t make Cinderella without tracking down the distant relatives of the Brothers Grimm. Expand copyright law to something like the individual words of a language, and the problem grows exponentially.

But for indigenous groups, copyright is a way to preserve the traditions of cultures that have often been scattered and brutally suppressed, preventing outsiders from trivializing or copying them. Establishing control over language, religious ceremonies, and art is a way to draw boundaries around a community that’s trying to reconstitute itself.

Most high-profile indigenous intellectual property cases have ended in voluntary settlements instead of actual legal fights. In 2001, for instance, New Zealand’s Maori community took Lego to task for frivolously using meaningful Polynesian names by putting them in its Bionicle toy line. The company refused to remove the offending sets from circulation, but it promised to strip the most offensive words from future toys and to create a code of conduct for using folklore.