Is There Copyright in a Citation Style?
Reading some posts and tweets (p&t’s?) on standards for legislation and opinion metadata lately, I was surprised to bump into a side-issue, “side” at least in this context, on whether the US Bluebook can have copyright in its citation styles. Apparently some development of legal style at Zotero has been hindered because of objections from Bluebook. See this contribution to a discussion on the Zotero forum on September 18, 2011:
Hi, I’m the author of the “Bluebook 19th ed.” style. The style itself is incomplete, which is the cause of the “bb-periodical-subsequent” string that you’re seeing in the output.
I was at the point of putting in further work on the project when, in connection with negotiations over access to Bluebook Online (or so I thought), the Bluebook editors expressed the view that a full implementation of the style, even if based on a paper-printed copy of their manual, might be a breach of their rights. Needless to say this came as a complete surprise, but legal risk being what it is, I’ve suspended work on the style for the present.
To prevent frustration (such as you have just experienced) I will soon be asking that the style be removed entirely from the CSL repository. Meanwhile, you will either have to cope with an earlier version of the style, or do your Bluebook citations by hand.
I’m very sorry about this situation, but it’s not entirely within my control.
Frank Bennett
It would seem from a tweet yesterday that Bennett, an Associate Professor of Law at Nagoya University, Japan, is in fact going ahead. He says of the Bluebook people:
They growled at us, without clearly staking a copyright claim. On good advice from a friend, I’m ignoring them.
I don’t think a style or a standard such as that developed by the Bluebook editors could be copyrightable, under Canadian law at least, though I’d welcome correction on this score. It strikes me as more akin to a process for which patents have been given. But in either case, it would be odd indeed, because the point of a standard is to be used, taught and otherwise promoted, no?
This is a little like the problem with taxonomies, in which copyright has in fact been claimed.
If it’s purely functional, and the only way to access a cited case, then it’s like a computer “API” or application programming interface. The latter are recognized in at least the U.S. and Canada, and probably world-wide, as not copyrightable.
A current case arguing the copyright of functional APIs in the U.S. is Oracle vs Google, described informally at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20111114220421747
–dave
Copyright claims in regard to style guides are absurd. In large measure, the guides simply consolidate existing best (and sometimes worst) practices rather than create anything new. In most instances, the guides are silence as to the source of their content. Ironic in that they are frequently published by universities who supposedly abhor uncredited sources.
The claim to legal taxonomies is equally absurd given that they are almost entirely derivative from older publications that are in the public domain. While the courts have said that there can be copyright in a taxonomy, they have not determined that any Canadian publisher has copyright in any of the taxonomies that they use.