The Indigo Book

Not to be confused with Indigo Books and Music.

The Indigo Book: An Open and Compatible Imple-

threats over its original name, Baby Blues, which lawyers

representing the HLRA felt was too similar to the Bluebook trademark. These threats led to the renaming of the
guide to The Indigo Book in March 2016.

1 History
Nagoya University Graduate School of Law academic
Frank Bennett had wished to include support for the
Bluebooka widely used system of legal citations, into
the open source citation management software Zotero.
However, lawyers representing the Harvard Law Review Association, who publishes the Bluebook, asserted
that the Bluebook's inclusion of carefully curated examples, explanations and other textual materials made
it a copyrighted work. Carl Malamud, head of the organization Public.Resource.Org, was informed by Bennett about the refusals. New York University School of
Law professor Christopher Jon Sprigman caught wind
of Malamuds correspondence; he had argued that the
system of citation expressed in the Bluebook was in the
public domain because its widely mandated use in the
court system made it an edict of government,[1] going on
to state that in this case, a copyright is being used to keep
something private that we all have to use.[2] Additionally, U.S. copyright law states that a "system" is ineligible
for copyright protection.[3]

Cover

mentation of A Uniform System of Citation (formerly

Baby Blues Manual of Legal Citation) is a free content
version of the Bluebook system of legal citation. Founded
by New York University professor Christopher Jon Sprigman and published by Public.Resource.Org, it is an adaptation based on the 10th edition of the Bluebook as published by the Harvard Law Review Association in 1958,
which had entered the public domain in the United States
due to a non-renewed copyright.

Research conducted by Malamud and Sprigman found

that the 10th edition of the Bluebook, published in 1958,
had fallen into the public domain because its copyright
had not been renewed, as required by U.S. law at the time.
On October 6, 2014, Sprigman sent a letter of response
to the Harvard Law Review Association, disclosing these
ndings and arguing that the content of the then-current
19th edition was nearly identical to the 10th barring trivial
changes. Thus, he also announced an intent to publish a
free-content version of the Bluebook known as Baby Blue,
which would be adapted from the public domain text of
the 10th edition with newly-created material that implements the Bluebooks system of citation in a fully usable
form.[1][4][2]

Sprigman has argued that the system of citation expressed

in the Bluebook was eectively public domain because
its mandated usage in courts made it an "edict of government", and because, barring trivial changes, the thencurrent 19th edition was nearly identical to the public
domain 10th edition. Sprigman stated that the projects
main goal was to allow the Bluebooks system of citation
to be widely available at no cost, and allow others to collaborate on it under an open source model.

Sprigman explained that every person, including every

poor person, should be able to cite the law. Imprisoned
litigants, pro se litigants, legal clinics, small law rms and
solo practitioners all of them need better access to our
The Indigo Book is an unocial substitute to the ocial system of legal citation if the law is to work for them and
Bluebook and is not endorsed by the Harvard Law Review for their clients. And that means free access.[3] Sprigman
Association; in December 2015, the project faced legal also stated that the use of an open source development
1

model and licensing would allow others to contribute to

and help improve the system; he argued that the Bluebook
in its current form was over-prescriptive and rigid and
a barrier to entry to our legal system, going on to ask,
what other standard of this importance to the American
public would be entrusted to a group so small, unrepresentative, closed to input, and beyond both supervision
and discipline?"[3]

EXTERNAL LINKS

2 See also
Case citation
Maroonbook
ALWD Citation Manual

3 References
1.1

Trademark issues

[1] Sprigman, Christopher Jon (October 6, 2014). HLR letter (PDF). Retrieved 21 April 2016.
[2] Legal minds dier on whether The Bluebook is subject to
copyright protection. ABA Journal. Retrieved 21 April
2016.
[3] Post, David G. (February 11, 2016) [1st pub. February
9, 2016]. The Volokh Conspiracy: Opinion: The new
(and much improved) 'Bluebook' caught in the copyright
crosshairs. The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
[4] Leung, Peter C. (February 11, 2016). Intellectual Property Blog: Is Copyright an Obstacle to Properly Cited Justice?". Bloomberg BNA. Archived from the original on
February 13, 2016. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
[5] "'Bluebook' Critics Incite Copyright Clash. The Wall
Street Journal. December 28, 2015.
[6] Public Domain Citation Book, Baby Blue, Renamed To
Indigo Book, Following Harvard Law Review Threats.
Techdirt. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
[7] Malamud, Carl (March 31, 2016). Letter from Public
Resource to Harvard Law Review Association (PDF).
public.resource.org. Retrieved 22 April 2016.

4 External links
The original Baby Blue title was the subject of legal threats due
to its similarities to that of Bluebook.

In December 2015, following Twitter postings by Malamud teasing the upcoming release of Baby Blue, the
Harvard Law Review Association threatened legal action
against the project, as it believed that the name Baby Blue
had a confusing similarity to the Bluebook trademark,
and requested a copy of the publication to perform intellectual property examinations under a presumption that
it may be substantially similar to the copyrighted work.
Sprigman objected to the trademark claims, feeling that
the idea they own the name 'blue' for a manual for legal citations is ridiculous. Following the threats, a group
of over 120 Yale Law School students issued a letter in
support of the Baby Blue project.[3][5] In response to the
trademark concerns, the project changed its name to the
Indigo Book in March 2016.[6][7]

Ocial website
PDF version

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

5.1

Text

The Indigo Book Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indigo_Book?oldid=716838132 Contributors: LLarson, Paulscrawl, Neutrality, Mendaliv, Czar, ViperSnake151, Piledhigheranddeeper, PraeceptorIP, I dream of horses, Tinton5, Cyberbot II, Kjack1071, Lasaltzman
and Anonymous: 4

5.2

Images

File:Cover_of_Baby_Blue{}s_Manual_of_Legal_Citation.jpg Source:
Baby_Blue%27s_Manual_of_Legal_Citation.jpg License: PD Contributors:
Baby Blues Manual of Legal Citations
Original artist:
Public.Resource.Org
File:Johnny-automatic-scales-of-justice.svg
Johnny-automatic-scales-of-justice.svg License:
artist: johnny_automatic

Source:
CC0 Contributors:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Cover_of_

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/
https://openclipart.org/detail/26849/scales-of-justice Original

File:The_Indigo_Book_cover.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/The_Indigo_Book_cover.png License: CC0 Contributors: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/blue/IndigoBook.pdf Original artist:

Text: Sprigman et al.
Image: Library of Congress Digital File LC-DIG-ppmsca-38347 (see below)

5.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0