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, 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”)
Special Guest: Christopher Sprigman.