In addition, according to NYU Professor Christopher Sprigman, "the copyright for the 10th edition of the tome, published in 1958, was never renewed, and ... that means it is in the public domain." See Yale Law Students Support The End Of The Bluebook, Above the Law (February 9, 2016).
A. Darby Dickerson, An Un-Uniform System of Citation: Surviving with the New Bluebook, 26 Stetson L. Rev. 53, 58–60 (1996). According to Shapiro and Krishnaswami, however, "The abandonment of brown is often attributed to the association of that color with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but that idea appears to trace to a joke by Alan Strasser," in Technical Due Process: ?, 12 Harv. C.R.-C.L. Rev. 507, 508 (1977). Strasser states, referring to the eleventh edition's change of cover color to white with a blue border promising a "new life," that "the 1939 Blue Book had electrified the nation by parading patriotic blue covers instead of the Germanic brown ones that had disgraced the 1936 edition." Id. (footnote omitted).
Fred R. Shapiro & Julie Graves Krishnaswami, The Secret History of the Bluebook, 100 Minnesota Law Review 222 (2016), Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 560
David Post called it "the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable." Adam Liptak described it as "a 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." The new (and much improved) 'Bluebook' caught in the copyright cross-hairs, Washington Post, The Volokh Conspiracy (Feb. 9, 2016).
Letter quoted in Jacob Gershman, Bluebook Critics Incite Copyright Clash, Wall Street Journal Law Blog (December 28, 2015), and in Mike Masnick, Harvard Law Review Freaks Out, Sends Christmas Eve Threat Over Public Domain Citation Guide], in Techdirt (December 28, 2015).
