{"id":181925,"date":"2016-02-09T19:57:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/09\/today-in-ip-stupidity\/"},"modified":"2016-02-09T19:57:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-10T00:57:00","slug":"today-in-ip-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/02\/09\/today-in-ip-stupidity\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in IP Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Harvard Law Review Society publishes a book called the “A Uniform System of Citation,” for lawyers.<\/div>\n

It’s more generally referred to as “The Blue Book”, and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the “Baby Blue”.<\/p>\n

The response from the HLRS? A cease and desist letter to the students from their lawyer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

War is brewing over the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable: the \u201cBluebook,\u201d the 580-page quasi-authoritative source of proper legal citation formats published by the Harvard Law Review, described by Adam Liptak of the New York Times a few months ago as \u201ca comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like [that] is both grotesque and indispensable.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Students at NYU Law School have prepared a new, streamlined, open-access citation system and gotten it ready for publication; but Chris Sprigman, a law prof at NYU, posted this open letter to his \u201claw professor friends\u201d yesterday:<\/span><\/p>\n

I am writing to ask you to help me with something important. You may know that for the last year, I\u2019ve been working on a public domain implementation of the Bluebook\u2019s Uniform System of Citation.<\/span>

<\/span>The work, which I\u2019ve named \u202a#\u200eBabyBlue\u202c, is now done, but we\u2019re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>The conflict has been brewing for a few months \u2014 starting with a letter from Harvard Law Review\u2019s lawyers to publisher Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

I write concerning . . . your imminent release of an \u201cimplementation of the Bluebook\u2019s Uniform System of Citation\u201d called \u201cBabyBlue,\u201d possibly as soon as December 31, 2015. Based on the description of \u201cBabyBlue\u201d \u2026 we believe that \u201cBabyBlue\u201d may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>It\u2019s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.<\/span>

<\/span>Here\u2019s a bit of free legal advice: If you want to assert copyright protection over something, don\u2019t call it \u201cA Uniform System<\/i><\/b> of Citation\u201d \u2014 because systems are, by definition, unprotected by copyright. Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act couldn\u2019t be clearer:<\/span><\/p>\n

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, [or] method of operation, \u2026 regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It gets even better. <\/p>\n

It appears the Harvard Law Review Society is not the creator of this document<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student\u2019s first encounter with The Bluebook<\/a>, a 582-page style manual formally known as \u201cA Uniform System of Citation.\u201d It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.<\/span>

<\/span>The Harvard Law Review<\/a> has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article<\/a> from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival\u2019s account is \u201cwildly erroneous.\u201d The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro<\/a> and Julie Graves Krishnaswami<\/a>, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,\u201d Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. \u201cHarvard entered into the picture later.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>The new article ends on a sheepish note.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cSome readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,\u201d it says. \u201cOur response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cAnd these were,\u201d the article says, \u201cvery small pages.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shades of the song, Happy Birthday to You<\/i>, where the evidence is fairly clear that the copyright holders never actually wrote the song.<\/p>\n

Our IP system is broken, and needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n

Actually, it needs to be burned to the ground, because the system has engendered attitudes that lead to this crap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Harvard Law Review Society publishes a book called the “A Uniform System of Citation,” for lawyers. It’s more generally referred to as “The Blue Book”, and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the “Baby Blue”. The response from the HLRS? …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1134,968,1109,972,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-education","category-ip","category-justice","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}