In a world where a single power controlled the language of justice itself, one man (well, several people and a bunch of students, but anyway) rose up to … produce a free guide to the standardized practices of legal citation. Copyright scholar Chris Sprigman joins us to talk about two of his projects: Baby Blue, the open guide to legal citation, and the Restatement of Copyright. Our conversation: about Baby Blue (0:01:33), what in the Bluebook might be copyrightable (0:10:07), trademark and the two manuals’ names and colors (0:23:44), simplification of citation (0:39:43), and the Restatement of Copyright (0:56:52).

This show’s links:

• Chris Sprigman’s faculty profile, twitter, and writing
• Baby Blue: web page and PDF
• Oral Argument 88: The Blue Line
• The Bluebook
• Links to correspondence between lawyers for The Bluebook and others and the Baby Blue team
• Zotero and Papers
• The University of Chicago’s Citation Management for Law Students; Georgetown’s Bluebook Citation Resources and Detailed Feature Comparison
• Cory Doctorow, years-of-being-intimidate.html">Five Years of Being Intimidated by the Harvard Bluebook’s Copyright Policies; FGBR, The Bluebook: A Plot Summary
• The Baby Blue public request for comments
• Subject matter of copyright: In general (s.102(b))
• Lotus v. Borland
• The University of Chicago Law Review, The Maroonbook
• McNeil Nutritionals v. Heartland Sweeteners (3d Cir. 2007) and later proceedings
• American Law Institute, Restatement of Copyright
• About secondary liability for copyright infringement
• Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings and Cablevision Systems (whether 1.2 seconds of buffering on a hard drive is a “fixation”)