Mapuche Indians sue Microsoft for "language piracy”

Chile’s Mapuche Indians allege that Microsoft translated Windows software into their native language without getting tribal leaders’ permission.

— Microsoft sued by Chilean Indians over Windows translation - Nov. 23, 2006

Surprisingly, I feel like I actually have to side with M$ on this one. From a purely legal standpoint, today’s Mapuche didn’t ‘invent’ Mapuzugun and don’t have any rights to it. More than that, though, this is a free speech issue. We can’t dictate who speaks English, so why should the Mapuche be able to dictate who speaks their language? It would be one thing if this was some closely guarded tribal secret, but the fact is Mapuzugun is a living language spoken by ~440,000 people (or so Wikipedia tells me). Besides, the Mapuche are the only target audience for this product, so they can’t claim that their culture is being diluted or mass produced, since nobody else wants or needs a software suite written in a relatively obscure South American language.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

technorati tags:mapuche, mapundugun, language, politics, ip, microsoft

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