Style guides, copyright and derivative works

tipichris · October 5, 2013

Any IP lawyers out there? I've been working on a style sheet that implements a style guide released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC by-nc-nd) licence and it has occurred to me to wonder whether such a style sheet could be considered to be a derivative work. My gut feeling is that implementing a guide is unlikely to breach its copyright - if I prune a tree in accordance with British Standard 3998 I wouldn't expect to find the BSI's lawyers banging on my door. But this isn't really something I know much about. Can anyone enlighten me?

adamsmith · October 5, 2013

All reference managers implement a good number of fully copyrighted style manuals (e.g. Chicago Manual, Turabian, APA) so I wouldn't worry about it.
I'm not aware of any specific ruling on this, but at least under US IP law you can generally not copyright patterns - there _have_ been some rulings on this wrt knitting patterns.