Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

An Exclusive Right to Publish the California Style Manual?

Thursday, August 31st, 2017

I. The California Style Manual (5th ed.)

A number of states that edit and publish (or contract for) their own case reports have style manuals.  Most are aimed principally at the state’s judges together with the law clerks and reporters of decisions who assist them in preparing and editing opinions.  Unless court rules say otherwise such manuals are likely, as well, to influence the citation format of memoranda and briefs submitted to courts in the state.  Usually, however, they are not prescriptive.  The California Style Manual is unusual, if not unique, in going beyond being a mere source of influence.  It provides one of two citation schemes that  are acceptable in attorney submissions.  Rule 1.200 of the California Rules of Court requires that any lawyer filing a document in state court conform its citations to the California Style Manual or to The Bluebook.  It also requires that whichever is employed must be used consistently throughout.

The first edition of the California manual appeared in 1942, prepared by the then Reporter of Decisions, Bernard Witkin, a towering figure in the chronicling of California law.  Subsequent revisions have all been overseen by Witkin’s successors, aided by court staff and employees of the official report publisher.  The fourth edition, prepared by Edward Jessen, who retired as Reporter of Decisions in 2014 after 25 years, was published in 2000.  Copies, produced under license from the copyright holder, the California Supreme Court, are available in print from Thomson Reuters for $16.95.

They can also be downloaded in PDF from the Sixth District Appellate Program (SDAP) for free.

This June the contract for a fifth edition was signed with LexisNexis.  The transaction was not completed as an independent agreement but buried as one paragraph among many in a contract for publication of the state’s official reports for the next two to seven years.  (By statute that contract may not exceed seven years.  Cal. Gov’t Code 68904.  As the underlying contract is structured, its term is for two years, followed by two options to extend that for a total of five more.)

Embedded within that two-year contract is the following provision:

The Contractor must assist the Reporter of Decisions in creation and production of the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition. Such assistance shall consist of all editorial, typographic, layout, and graphic design necessary to the production of an independent, separate print product. The California Style Manual, Fifth Edition, must be produced in both hard copy printed and electronic format. The format chosen must be able to support supplements and updates. Copyright to the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition, will be held by the State of California but the Contractor will be granted an exclusive perpetual license to publish and sell the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition, at the price agreed upon and in accordance with the price adjustment provisions set forth in this Agreement. The Contractor has discretion to propose editorial enhancements to or format for the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition, not specified above. The Contractor must print and make available for sale a sufficient number of copies of the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition, to supply all demands for 20 years from the date of publication. Volumes supplied pursuant to this requirement must be sold at prices no greater than the current applicable price authorized under the contract for publication of bound volumes of the Official Reports in effect at that time. [Emphasis added. PWM]

Note the word “perpetual.”  It did not appear in the RFP.  That strongly suggests that this term resulted from subsequent negotiation by the successful bidder, LexisNexis.  The result is an uncomfortably long-term relationship between the California judiciary and the incumbent publisher of the state’s appellate decisions.  On its face the license exceeds the maximum duration set out in the statute authorizing the contract in which it is embedded.  Thomson Reuters, printer and seller of the current version of the California Style Manual in print (the fourth edition), appears to hold no such right.  No other state has granted its publisher comparable control over the future format of judicial opinions and attorney submissions or effectively barred itself from distributing its own style manual, internally and to the public for free.

II. Other States’ Style and Citation Guides

Michigan’s Office of the Reporter of Decisions  prepares and follows the Michigan Appellate Opinion Manual.  It also offers the manual “as an aid to practitioners in the preparation of documents for submission to the courts.”   Use by lawyers is not mandatory, but it is available to them free, online.  Its copyright notice names the Supreme Court of Michigan.  The New York Law Reporting Bureau also distributes its Official Reports Style Manual online.  Updated periodically, it is available in both HTML and PDF formats, copyright New York Unified Court System.  The Oregon Judicial Department publishes the Oregon Appellate Courts Style Manual online and doesn’t bother to assert copyright.  The Washington Style Sheet, put out and placed online by that state’s office of the reporter of decisions, is treated similarly.

Court rules in a number of states specify how their own primary legal sources are to be cited.  No exclusive publication rights in these rules are granted commercial parties.  Examples include Fla. R. App. P. 9.800,  Ind. R. App. P. 22, and S.C. R. App. Pract. R. 268.

III. What Rights in the New Edition Are Left with the State?

Under the Copyright Act, an exclusive licensee can sue for infringement.  Indeed, the licensee can sue the copyright owner/licensor for infringing upon the granted rights.  See. e.g.Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. v. Vroom, 186 F.3d 283 (2d Cir. 1999).  There seems little doubt that under the current act a “perpetual license” extends for the full duration of the underlying copyright.  See, e.g., P.C. Films Corp. v. MGM/UA Home Video Inc., 138 F.3d 45 (2d Cir. 1998).  That is not “forever” but with a “work for hire” of this sort the copyright term is 95 years from the date of publication.  17 U.S. Code § 302(c).  In this instance, the right is coupled with a limitation on sale price and the obligation to produce the work in sufficient quantity to meet demand over the course of twenty years.  All of that puts enormous stress on the exact boundaries of the license granted LexisNexis, namely, the right “to publish and sell the California Style Manual, Fifth Edition.”  Confounding the puzzle is the requirement that the work’s “format … be able to support supplements and updates” and the explicit reference to both print and electronic versions.  Combine those with the enough-copies-for-20-years provision and it seems unlikely that a sixth edition will provide release from this unusual commitment any time soon.

Just as The Bluebook‘s copyright does not give its holders the exclusive right to communicate the system of citation it describes, others will be free to produce guides, software, and teaching materials that embody the system of citation and elements of style to be contained in this forthcoming edition of the California Style Manual.  Since the license does not convey the right to make derivative works, it should not prevent the state from producing a sixth edition when it decides to.  See Kennedy v. National Juvenile Detention Ass’n, 187 F.3d 690 (7th Cir. 1999).  But from publication of the fifth edition until the appearance of a sixth, the California judiciary’s ability to do as other states do – namely, disseminate its style manual online within state government and to the public, without charge – has been surrendered.

IV. Why?

Several provisions in the underlying official reports contract gesture toward the possibility of California’s appellate courts following those of other states that have shifted from print to official digital publication.  Most important among them is the limitation of the state’s commitment to two years.

On the other hand, the state’s breaking free of a model of producing official print reports using a commercial publisher would deny the incumbent the competitive advantage of privileged access to official, final, citable, versions of California case law in digital format.  There are many reasons why it is time for California to make that move.  However, it appears that LexisNexis values its privileged access sufficiently to commit significant editorial services and to provide the state’s appellate judges with complimentary copies of the reports, all at no charge.  Provisions in the RFP that would have reduced the contract’s value to LexisNexis (such as inclusion of page numbers and delivery of final versions of opinions in machine-readable form at the required public access site) drew no meaningful commitment in its proposal.

Having an exclusive publication and sale right to a resource critical to the editorial work on California’s opinions, one that runs for the maximum period to which the new official report contract can be extended and beyond would appear to reduce the risk to the publisher of California’s breaking out of the print-era paradigm during the next seven years.

V. Under What Authority?

On December 16, 2016, the California Judicial Council released the eighth edition of its Trial Court Financial Policies and Procedures Manual.  It is distributed online, without charge, and carries no copyright notice.  Less than a year later, the council released the most recent revision of the Judicial Branch Contracting Manual.  It does contains  copyright notice, although no copyright has been registered.

The statute authorizing the “official reports” contract is very clear about its maximum duration.  This is a contract to “publish and sell the official reports, for a period of not less than two nor more than seven years.”  Cal. Gov’t Code § 68904.  It is to be let to the publisher who will do so “on the terms most advantageous to the state and to the public.”  Id.  Surely, though, that “most advantageous” language does not provide boundless authority to grant the publisher perpetual exclusive rights to publish and sell other judicial branch manuals and guides, like those noted above.  Some might even question whether it authorizes the sort of value exchange embedded in the current official reports agreement since the statute is grounded upon a constitutional provision mandating that the judiciary’s opinions “shall be available for publication by any person.”  Cal. Constitution Article VI, Section 14.  Does it authorize the granting of a perpetual exclusive license to publish the California Style Manual?  The matter would seem debatable.

 

 

From Blue to Indigo to …

Friday, May 20th, 2016

indigo

A New Citation Guide

A legal citation guide of a different hue, The Indigo Book, arrived on the scene this spring. Like the University Chicago Law Review’s Maroonbook, it was born of frustration over The Bluebook – but frustration of a very different kind.  The Maroonbook, first published in the late 1980s, still followed and revised by the University of Chicago Law Review, aimed to supplant The Bluebook’s complex and detailed dictates with “a simple, malleable framework for citation, which authors and editors can tailor to suit their purposes.”  In contrast, The Indigo Book, seeks to pry loose those very dictates, or at least the subset most important for participation in U.S. legal proceedings, from the intellectual property claims made by The Bluebook’s proprietors.

Working under the guidance of NYU copyright expert, Professor Christopher Sprigman, a team of students spent over a year meticulously separating the “system of citation” reflected in The Bluebook from that manual’s expressive content – its language, examples, and organization.  The Indigo Book is the result.  Like the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, first published in 2000, it endeavors to instruct those who would write legal briefs or memoranda on how to cite U.S. legal materials in complete conformity with the system of citation codified in the most recent edition of The Bluebook while avoiding infringement of that work’s copyright.

Unlike the ALWD Guide, which competes with The Bluebook for a share of the lucrative legal education market at a similarly substantial price, this new entrant is free.  It can be viewed online or downloaded, without charge, in either of two formats – PDF or HTML.  As the work’s forward explains, providing “pro se litigants, prisoners, and others seeking justice but … lack[ing] resources … effective access to the system lawyers use to cite to the law” was, for its creators, an important goal.

Relatively few U.S. jurisdictions formally require that citations in court filings conform to the scheme set out in The Bluebook.  (I count one U.S. circuit court, a handful of U.S. district courts, and the appellate courts of eleven states.)  But Bluebook-compatible citations are consistent with the rules of most.  By removing price as a barrier and focusing on the legal materials most frequently cited in U.S. proceedings, this guide of a different color seeks to improve access to the nation’s judicial system.

Establishing a Space for Innovation

The Indigo Book is free in a second, more radical sense.  It has been released with a Creative Commons public domain dedication.  Anyone can copy and redistribute it.  Anyone can create new and different works based upon it.  No further permission from the creators or publisher is required.  The aim here is said to be the clearing of this zone, so important to our legal system, for further innovation.

From the very outset, The Indigo Book project has been both goaded and troubled by overbroad copyright threats and innuendo from The Bluebook’s proprietors and their attorneys.  (Carl Malamud, who has been central to the project and whose Public.Resource.Org is Indigo‘s publisher, tells the full lamentable story here.) By separating the widely used system of citation codified in The Bluebook from its particularized expression, The Indigo Book seeks to build a wall between such claims and the projects of future software and database developers and citation guide authors.

“Not Authorized by Nor in Any Way Affiliated with …”

Why indigo?  As discussed in an earlier post, the four law journals that publish The Bluebook hold registered trademarks in three variations of that name.  The Indigo Book was, for a time, going to be “Baby Blue.”  The law firm representing the Harvard Law Review Association demanded that the title be changed and that it not be replaced by one “consisting of or comprising the word ‘Blue’”While denying that “Baby Blue” posed any risk of trademark confusion or dilution, the creators of the new guide decided, nonetheless, to change its name rather than waste time and money on litigation.  Quite possibly they shared Isaac Asimov’s view:

It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.

What Are the Likely Prospects for the New Guide?

In legal education

The Bluebook is published by four law journals and commands the allegiance of nearly all law student-edited reviews in the country.  Due to the place of those reviews in law school culture, faculty members responsible for courses on legal writing are under powerful pressure to teach the “Bluebook” rules.  Over time that pressure induced the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) to bring that organization’s competing guide into complete conformity.  Like the new Indigo Book, the ALWD guide is better organized than The Bookbook itself and, on many points, clearer in explanation and illustration.  It, too, has saved space and maintenance burden by limiting itself to U.S. sources.  Even so, powerful network effects have limited its market share.  For The Bluebook is not merely manifest in the format of the citations it enables journal editors, legal academics, lawyers, and legal assistants to produce.  It also represents a matrix of rule numbers and tables that facilitates communication about and resolution of citation issues.  Biblical exegesis is characterized by reference to chapter and verse.  Law review debates over proper citation form refer to Bluebook rule numbers, tables, and text.  Even at the powerfully attractive price point of free, The Indigo Book will run up against the dependence of most citation discourse within America’s law schools, student-edited journals, and large firms on The Bluebook’s classificatory scheme and specific language.

As a Resource for “pro se litigants, prisoners, and others seeking justice”

In the form released the new guide is also unlikely to be of much aid to those navigating the legal system on their own.  By seeking to liberate the full system of citation explicated in 350 or so of The Bluebook’s pages, Indigo had, of necessity, to be far more detailed than any useful self-help guide should be.  Moreover, that detail incorporates numerous points on which The Bluebook reflects the undue influence of major publishers and many others in which is out of step with the evolving citation practice of lawyers and judges responding to the proliferation of electronic sources.

By placing their guide in the public domain, however, The Indigo Book’s creators have made it possible for groups preparing pro se handbooks, web site resources, and courthouse kiosks to draw upon it in preparing appropriately tailored citation guidance.  Other derivative work possibilities abound.  Bar groups or court systems may well be tempted to prepare citation manuals adapted to state-specific citation requirements and norms.  Citation software developers should be able to proceed without infringement fears. All of this is to be hoped for.

As the author of a free citation reference, now in its twenty-third year, I welcome The Indigo Book and all its future progeny.

New Mexico’s Mandate That Medium-Neutral Citations Be Used for Cases Originally Issued without Them

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

New Mexico’s Unique Citation Rule

Since August 1, 2013 briefs, memoranda, and other papers filed with New Mexico’s courts have been required to use a system of medium-neutral case citation for all New Mexico appellate decisions. That citation system, similar although not identical to the model recommended by the American Bar Association and American Association of Law Libraries, was first implemented by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1996. Pierce v. State, released for publication on January 4th of that year, was designated “1996-NMSC-001”. The first decision of the state’s court of appeals in 1996, State v. Gutierrez, carried the citation “1996-NMCA-001”. Both were issued with numbered paragraphs. Simultaneously issued citation rules required filings in New Mexico courts to cite those decisions and subsequent ones using their medium-neutral citations.

What is unprecedented about the 2013 amendment to those rules is that it requires that New Mexico’s print-independent citation system be used for all pre-1996 decisions reaching back to 1852. No other state has taken this step. Shortly after Oklahoma implemented medium-neutral citation in 1997, it retrofitted all prior reported decisions. But that state’s citation rule, then and now, simply provides that parallel citations employing the print-independent scheme are “strongly encouraged for opinions promulgated prior to May 1, 1997“.

Some Background

The New Mexico Compilation Commission began as an agency responsible for producing a full compilation of the state’s statutes, hence its name. In 1982, however, the commission was  given additional responsibility — publication of the New Mexico Reports. In 2004 it was declared to be the state’s official legal publisher. In 2011 the commission ended print publication of the New Mexico Reports, and the state’s supreme court designated the authenticated electronic files of decisions at the Compilation Commission web site their final, official version.  And in 2012 the Commission’s database of electronic decision files, each with a medium-neutral designation  (e.g., “1982-NMCA-051”) and paragraph numbering, was extended all the way back to Bray v. United States, 1852-NMSC-001.

Today, the Compilation Commission offers legal professionals and state offices the compiled statutes of New Mexico in both print and electronic format.  Combined with the state’s case law, court rules, decisions of the regional federal courts, and other material, the commission’s integrated DVD and online database serve state and local government offices and compete with the commercial research services in the legal information market.  Because of an attractive subscription price (roughly $60 a month for the general public, less for state and local government agencies), official status, and a growing list of features (most recently a limited citator service for its case reports) these services, known as NMONESOURCE, do, in fact, offer serious competition.

The principal drawback of the Compilation Commission’s database for legal professionals is its tight focus on New Mexico.  With some frequency the state’s judges and lawyers need access to federal case law, statutes, and regulations.  On occasion, they must consult decisions from other states.  Although the Compilation Commission’s electronic library includes a collection of the most useful federal decisions and serves as a portal, linking to Google Scholar for the case law of other states and U.S. government sites for the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, it falls short of providing a full range of non-New Mexico primary legal material.  At a minimum the users of NMONESOURCE must, from time to time, turn to some other research service.   Convenience may lead them to stay or even start out elsewhere.  The default “other service” for New Mexico’s lawyers is Fastcase, available as a membership service to all members of the bar.   For the state’s judges it is Westlaw, to which all of them, from the district courts  through the state supreme court, have access under a group Westlaw subscription.

Consequences to Date

Compliance by Judges, Lawyers, and Law Students

Current decisions of the appellate courts of New Mexico model the citation format the 2013 rule requires of lawyers.  While that rule does not require parallel print-based citations for state decisions dated after the cutoff for the final volume of the New Mexico Reports, judges continue to include parallel references to the Pacific Reporter of the Thomson Reuters National Reporter System.   As the rule directs, however, their pinpoint references employ the paragraph numbers of the medium-neutral format.  Review of a small sample of briefs filed in recent New Mexico appeals leaves little doubt that the system has also taken hold among lawyers.  Student editors of the New Mexico Law Review employ the new citation method in their writing.

Take Up by Major Law Databases

To comply with the 2013 citation rule, the judge, lawyer, or law student needs access to a database that has retrofitted its collection of New Mexico’s pre-1996 decisions with medium-neutral case identifiers and paragraph numbers.  A database search on “contract breach” may lead a researcher to the 1959 decision of the New Mexico Supreme Court in Wolf v. Perry or the 1993 case, Mark V, Inc. v. Mellekas.  When first published and for years thereafter the volume and page numbers of those two decisions in the New Mexico Reports and Pacific Reporter would have provided proper citations.  Indeed, they had none other.  But as of August 1, 2013, Wolf v. Perry is to be cited as “1959-NMSC-044”; Mark V, Inc., as “1993-NMSC-001”.  While a search on Bloomberg Law, Google Scholar, or Fastcase will take you to those cases, none of those services yet delivers their neutral citations, let alone the paragraph numbering needed to direct a reader to a specific passage.

Does this place the subscription service offered by the New Mexico Compilation Commission in a unique competitive position?  No.  The same search conducted on LexisNexis or Westlaw reveals that those services have followed the commission’s lead and added neutral cites and paragraph numbers to all pre-1996 New Mexico cases.  Other research services serious about the New Mexico market will, no doubt, do the same.  No license from the state is required.  Despite the copyright notices that appear throughout the Compilation Commission site, New Mexico could not and does not claim copyright in either the case citations or paragraph numbers.

In the meantime, researchers who wish to cite pre-1996 cases identified through use of a database that has not inserted the new citation parameters can obtain them, case-by-case, from open access resources offered by the Compilation Commission.  The commission’s web site holds tables that allow one to convert any pre-2013 official cite (“65 N.M. 457” or “114 N.M. 778”, say) to the new system (“1959-NMSC-004” and “1993-NMSC-001”, respectively).  The site also provides, as a free public resource, a comprehensive case law collection reformatted in accordance with the new standard.  From it one can draw the paragraph numbers the new rule calls for in pinpoint cites.  Furthermore, because the commission’s site is open to external search engines it is possible to bypass the lookup tables and go straight to the decision one wants to cite.  A Google search on “114 N.M. 778” or “845 P.2d 1232” limited to the commission’s site will lead directly to the medium-neutral version of Mark V, Inc. v. Mellekas as well as recent cases citing that decision.  In fact, because the site is open to external search engines the initial case research need not begin elsewhere.

Lack of Reinforcement in NMSA and Most Other Annotations

As the state’s official publisher the New Mexico Compilation Commission also publishes the New Mexico Statutes Annotated and the New Mexico Rules Annotated.  Both are included in electronic form as components of its online and disc products.  They are also sold in print.  In neither have annotations to pre-1996 decisions yet been conformed to the new rule.  An annotation’s reference to a 1994 case will still cite it as  “In re Cutter, 118 N.M. 152, 879 P.2d 784 (1994)” rather than “In re Cutter, 1994-NMSC-086, 118 N.M. 152″.  So long as a researcher is working from the DVD or online version the annotation’s obsolete format is not a problem for the cites are linked to copies of the opinions, which carry the now official neutral citations and paragraph numbers.  On the other hand, since programmatic conversion of the old-form citations should be fairly straightforward there is reason to expect that it will occur before long.

The annotations that appear in Michie’s Annotated Statutes of New Mexico, as published online by LexisNexis, do contain cites that conform to the new rule.  Those in West’s New Mexico Statutes Annotated and in the Fastcase annotations to the New Mexico Statutes, as yet, do not.

Effects Limited to New Mexico

Many decisions of the U.S. District Court for New Mexico do employ the state’s medium-neutral citation scheme when citing its courts’ post-1996 decisions.  Not all do, however, and there is little evidence to date that federal judges will be induced to cite older New Mexico decisions in accordance with the 2013 rule.  When decisions from New Mexico, contemporary or older, are cited in other states, even states with their own systems of neutral citation, they are, almost invariably, cited by volume and page number.

A Model for Other States?

Oklahoma is the only other state to apply a non-proprietary medium-neutral citation scheme retrospectively to its full body of case law.  There, nearly two decades of “strong encouragement” to use the system in citing older decisions has had a pervasive effect on in-state citation practice.  In Oklahoma, like New Mexico, the policy was undergirded by creation of a comprehensive database of state law open to judges, other public officials, lawyers, and members of the general public — an initiative explicitly aimed at loosening dependence on commercial systems.

The barriers inhibiting prospective adoption of any new citation approach are sufficiently daunting and the costs of creating the necessary supporting database large enough that all other states adopting medium-neutral schemes have been content to leave their print-era case law wrapped in print-era citations.  Two of them, Arkansas and North Dakota, have done so despite having created public databases of earlier appellate decisions.  So long as the boundary between old and new is distinct this seems a totally defensible approach.  How a Illinois judge or lawyer should cite decisions of that state’s courts rests very clearly on when the decisions were filed.  Those released prior to July 1, 2011 and published in the Illinois Official Reports must be cited by volume and page number.  Decisions filed on or after July 1, 2011 with a “public-domain citation” must be cited using it.

What reasons might have led New Mexico to take a more radical approach to citation reform?  The first is that it could.  Without a full retrospective case law collection the publications and legal research services of the New Mexico Compilation Commission were seriously incomplete, including importantly its flagship New Mexico Statutes Annotated.  Assuming that construction of such a comprehensive digital archive had to be undertaken, the attachment of non-print-based citations in the same format as those that judges and lawyers had used for post-1996 cases may have seemed a modest add-on.  Moreover, the rule change could be seen as placing NMONESOURCE, the Compilation Commission’s subscription service, in a uniquely authoritative position.  Set up as an “enterprise unit” funded out of sales and subscription revenue along with a dedicated portion of court filing fees, the commission was in need of a resource boost.  As the annual report of the New Mexico judiciary for fiscal year 2013 noted:

The challenges facing the [commission] are the increases in publishing costs while revenue declined for the second year in a row. There is a significant loss in civil action filing fees due to the decrease in civil actions filed. There is strained subscription revenue stemming from the economy overall and the increase in self-represented litigants who elect to file civil actions and appear in court without legal counsel. Lawyers are forced to make difficult decisions to postpone subscribing to the official laws in favor of the limited, unannotated laws on the public access site.

However, since that same public access site provides a complete set of New Mexico decisions as well as look-up tables matching volume and page number cites with their medium-neutral equivalents and the leading commercial database services have rapidly incorporated the new cites, the 2013 rule change may not, in the end, have a significant effect on NMONESOURCE subscription revenue.

No other U.S. jurisdiction has an agency with the broad charge and challenging duties of New Mexico’s Compilation Commission or today has the initiative, incentive, or resources within the judiciary to create a database like the one Oklahoma established years ago.  For that reason it seems unlikely that the path New Mexico and Oklahoma have blazed will be followed by others anytime soon.

 

Using “The Bluebook®©!#%” without a license

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

In a prior post I reported on the erasure of all prior differences between the citation style set forth in the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation and that prescribed by the work entitled “The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.” Here my focus is on trademark and copyright issues that bear on the competition between these two citation manuals and influence how other works, print and electronic, address issues of legal citation.

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1. “The Bluebook” – A registered mark

Since 2010 the proprietors of the The Bluebook have held a registered trademark in its name. Actually “THE BLUEBOOK”, “THE BLUEBOOK ONLINE”, and “THE BLUEBOOK A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION” are now all registered “standard character marks.” The cover of that manual’s most recent edition has the “®” symbol immediately following the word “Bluebook”. So does its title page.

There are, of course, myriad books of a similar name reaching back several centuries. There are also numerous registered marks that include “Bluebook” or “Blue Book”.   As applied to a legal citation style guide, however, the phrase is surely indicative of a particular source. And while book titles cannot be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office, works of a series (think “Nancy Drew”, the “For Dummies” books, or closer to home “Williston on Contracts”) are registrable. There seems little doubt that successive editions of The Bluebook qualify. But what does that mean for the publisher of an ALWD guide that wants the relevant market to know that citations prepared in accordance with its instruction will conform in every particular to those prepared following The Bluebook’s rules and appendices.

It is fact that within its 608 pages this new ALWD Guide to Legal Citation makes absolutely no reference to The Bluebook. A cover-to-cover search for that phrase comes up dry. Extreme caution over infringing The Bluebook mark? Unlikely. In all probability this reflects a strategic choice. It may rest on the premise that naming the competition could be taken as a sign of weakness and a conviction that there are other effective ways to draw attention to this new guide’s relative merits. After all, the prior ALWD edition only mentioned that other manual once (to warn users of differences between the two). Outside the pages of this new edition, the publisher can and does draw attention to the removal of all differences between ALWD style and The Bluebook’s, naming the latter.

Comparative advertising that names a trademark-protected competing brand does not infringe the mark so long as it does not “cause confusion as to source” (“Same Sweetener AS EQUAL…. At A Sweeter Price”). See Cumberland Packing Corp. v. Monsanto Co., 32 F. Supp. 2d 561, 580-81 (E.D. N.Y. 1999).

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The largest segment of the market for both works is located in law school student bodies. And within that segment the choice between the two is, in nearly all cases, made by writing faculty or journal editors who, by adopting one or the other, effectively instruct students which to buy. ALWD needn’t put the phrase “The Bluebook” on or in its guide to put its marketing case in front of those intermediaries. Indeed, it is produced under the auspices and direction of the national association of those who teach legal writing.

What about the host of “Bluebook” study aids or software capable of delivering “Bluebook” compatible citations? Can they use its name in communicating what they offer directly to law students, legal academics, and lawyers? Yes, but they need to take greater care to prevent consumers from believing that The Bluebook’s proprietors have reviewed or vetted or authorized their work.

usersguide

Hein publishes a small book that used to be called User’s Guide to the Bluebook. The title now has a large “®” appended. The brochure advertising this work is riddled with that symbol and concludes with a footnote reading: “*The Copyright holder’s [sic] of The Bluebook did not contribute to, review, approve, or endorse The User’s Guide to The Bluebook.” Effective, but overkill. Compare the restrained treatment of the trademark status of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software in the guide entitled Excel 2013 for Dummies. On the other hand, Carolina Acadmic Press publishes Understanding and Mastering The Bluebook by Linda J. Barris. Neither its cover nor its front matter acknowledges The Bluebook trademark, identifies the holders, or contains a statement that it has not been reviewed or endorsed by them. That is very likely an oversight.

Over several years Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya sought to secure assurance that building a software module capable of taking citation elements held in a database and (as one of several options) producing citations consistent with Bluebook style, identifying that style by the name with which we all know it, would not infringe. He was rebuffed. Patience exhausted, Bennett has decided to call the output of his module “the MLZ Bluebook Style” and describe it as “an unauthorized implementation of ‘The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation’”. Accurate. Unlikely to produce consumer confusion.

nissan_altima

A final point. Since the target of the federal trademark act is consumer confusion over the source of goods or services sold in commerce, those of us who write about citation norms and style guides need not place an “®” next to “The Bluebook” or otherwise acknowledge the book title’s trademark status whenever we write about it and its contents, any more than an auto reviewer need do so when describing the 2014 Nissan Altima.

2. What about copyright and The Bluebook’s contents?

Like prior editions The Bluebook’s nineteenth displays a copyright notice. It reads: “Copyright © 2010 by the Columbia Law Review Association, The Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.” A review of U.S. Copyright Office records establishes that the book has been registered.

Disturbed by the treatment of Frank Bennett (recounted above) Carl Malamud proceeded down a more confrontational path. Last June he sent copies of a complete electronic replica of The Bluebook to several legal academics, and placed a small portion online. In doing so, he asserted that since several U.S. courts require that all citations in briefs or memoranda conform to The Bluebook its rules were (or ought to be) in the public domain. These actions drew a prompt response. A lawyer representing one of The Bluebook’s owners requested that Malamud cease distributing full copies of the guide and immediately take down the portions he had placed online, at the same time promising serious consideration of the access issues he raised. That process of “serious consideration” continues. In May Malamud received another letter. It represented that the book’s proprietors were “evaluating potential arrangements that would expand the availability of The Bluebook conventions, while at the same time, preserving the law reviews’ copyright interests and decades-long investment in The Bluebook.”

Note the distinction. Malamud’s response picked up on it at once. The citation conventions (or style or system) described in The Bluebook are not protected by its copyright. The U.S. Copyright Act is explicit on this point:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

17 U.S.C. § 102(b).

On the other hand, although the phrase “literary work” may not seem totally apposite The Bluebook is surely an “original work of authorship … fixed in [a] tangible medium of expression.” So long as a competing work (the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation or Introduction to Basic Legal Citation, for that matter) avoids employing the specific means used by The Bluebook to explain how to cite (e.g., its words, phrases, selected examples) that work can instruct readers on how to produce citations identical to those generated by careful use of The Bluebook. The same holds for citation software or online data vendors. Both Lexis Advance and WestlawNext generate citations that are included with material copied from their collections. Users have a choice among several different formats. “Bluebook” style appears on neither list, the default format for both being labeled “Standard”. Yet for important categories of material the “Standard” format that both produce conforms to the conventions set out in The Bluebook. Can these and other online data vendors deliver Bluebook citations without the permission of the book’s copyright holder? Surely, they can even though the reference book itself is covered by copyright and the distribution of verbatim copies is, for that reason, problematic.

3. The terms and conditions of use agreed to by users of The Bluebook Online and related aps

Those who click rather than page their way into the content of The Bluebook at www.legalbluebook.com are told that by doing so they agree not to display its trademarks without prior written approval or “create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, incorporate into another website, or in any other way exploit the information …[it contains], in whole or in part.” Apparently, while those that run The Bluebook enterprise take the IP rights represented by the circled “C” and circled “R” very seriously, they are not content to leave their proprietary claims to the contours of copyright and trademark law.

4. And who holds these IP rights with the right to license their use or sue for infringement?

There is no Bluebook Inc. The Bluebook‘s copyright notice and registration list four separate entities as owners: the Columbia Law Review Association, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. The same four appear on the trademark registration. Without knowing more about the agreements among these co-owners one can only speculate about how decisions might get made or, more likely, fail to get made.

Who at each of the four was responsible for deciding what to do with Frank Bennett’s email asking for assurance that his software wouldn’t infringe? Did his question even get beyond one.  Three of the journals are published by non-profit corporations.  The fourth, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, is simply a university activity. Professor Bennett wrote one of the journals and heard back, ultimately, from one of its editors. Are such decisions really lodged in the hands of here-today, gone-tomorrow law students?

One intriguing possibility is that the governing body for any one of the four journals could license The Bluebook, that being the default rule with joint works of authorship. Could a venture guided by so many lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers have left the matter in that posture? On the other hand, if the four must come to an agreement among themselves when confronted with a Bluebook rights or licensing issue, the representation that “The law reviews are evaluating potential arrangements that would expand the availability of The Bluebook conventions ….” seems unlikely to yield results anytime soon.