Should recipes have copyright?

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di reston

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Thought this article might interest you:


http://www.italy24.ilsole24ore.com/art/arts-and-leisure/2016-the-kitchen-to-edit-152749-php?uuid=AD6RPM0B

Food for thought indeed. What do you think? :neutral::mellow::huh:

di reston


Enough is never as good as a feast Oscar Wilde
 
Yes. The creative process should be honored. Writing a recipe is the same as writing a novel, inventing a gadget, writing music/lyrics, etc.
 
Only the lawyers would get rich.

If Adam and Eve's descendants can't collect the royalties, the which caveman, pray tell, gets the rights for any meat cooked with heat and fire?

And who would get the royalties for chunks/chips of chocolate? Would that extend to the creation of white choc chips? and butternut/caramel chips? Then after that who would get the royalties for baking them into globs of dough?

By the time you are finished you would be paying $5 a cookie.

If recipes were copyrighted would you have to pay royalties to bake a cake? Roast a beef? Make a white sauce?

Look what happens in the music industry!

In this day and age, with all those food bloggers out there, all the recipe books, all the home grown traditional recipes from each country and ethnic groups, etc... I believe it is not only nice and but important to credit who you learned/heard/saw a recipe from. But you can't say one person 'created' a recipe when they themselves learned about it from somewhere else.
 
I say no. If you don't want your recipes to be shared, keep them to yourself.
If you post them, then you gave them to the public to use and share.
I do say that if you use them and share you do give credit to where you received them.
 
Without trying to weigh in on the legalities, I wonder if it's even possible to come up with a new recipe. With billions of cooks and countless cookbook authors, food bloggers, etc., is there any recipe that hasn't already been created and published multiple times?

I have a couple of cookbooks written by Beth Hensperger. A quick check on Amazon lists a dozen cookbooks by her. Each one typically has hundreds of recipes. I have a hard time believing that she has developed thousands of recipes without borrowing from someone else's work. If you Google some of her recipes by title, it's not all that uncommon to find the same recipe word for word (or extremely close)elsewhere. Who stole from who?

You violated my copyright - I stole it fair and square!
 
The copyright rules for recipes pertain only to the written directions, you may NOT do those word for word without breaking copyright law.
 
You can't talk about copyright without weighing in on the legalities because it's a legal concept. And most people miss the point. It's not about coming up with something new that has never been done before. It's about original expression - how the person who wrote the recipe put it down in words.

I wrote this in the other thread: "What's protected is people's original expression, whether it's a sculpture, a piece of music, or a recipe. A list of ingredients alone is not protected by*copyright, but the way a person describes how to make the recipe is.*

"Some people include instructional information in their recipes; some don't. Some have a certain "voice" when they write that others don't have. Some give more details about prep or options than others. All of these contribute to making a recipe your own. And copyrightable, whether you want to take that step or not."
 
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Only the lawyers would get rich.

If Adam and Eve's descendants can't collect the royalties, the which caveman, pray tell, gets the rights for any meat cooked with heat and fire?

And who would get the royalties for chunks/chips of chocolate? Would that extend to the creation of white choc chips? and butternut/caramel chips? Then after that who would get the royalties for baking them into globs of dough?

By the time you are finished you would be paying $5 a cookie.

If recipes were copyrighted would you have to pay royalties to bake a cake? Roast a beef? Make a white sauce?

You say "would" and "if they were" as if recipes are not now protected by copyright. They are.
 
I came across the following:

"As a recipe/cooking blogger, you won’t run afoul of any copyright laws if you copy a recipe from somewhere else, as long as what you copied was no more than the list of ingredients and the bare directions. This makes sense – after all, how many ways of saying “2 teaspoons of salt” or “preheat the oven to 350F” are there?

However, any additional language someone has in the recipe (perhaps explaining what coconut flour is or saying that they love chocolate and so they always add a bit more chocolate chips into the cookie) may be copyrightable. If you’re going to copy a recipe, don’t copy those bits, and add in your own flair."

From The Definitive Guide to Recipes and Copyright

The link to the food blog alliance was interesting.

Another one:

"Lists are not subject to copyright, per US Copyright Law. This is well-known to mean the ingredient listing is not protected. With recipes, it’s the instructions or directions that are potentially copyrightable so long as they meet the criteria of being an original work of authorship and substantial literary expression. So that recipe for your fabulous margarita probably doesn’t count as ‘substantial literary expression’ when the directions are something like put all ingredients in blender, blend on high for 3 minutes, pour into glass and enjoy. What you need is something more, well, substantial."

From Recipe Copyright In Plain English
 
I think the copyright law itself as it pertains to recipes is pretty plain :)

Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.

Only original works of authorship are protected by copyright. “Original” means that an author produced a work by his or her own intellectual effort instead of copying it from an existing work.

For further information about copyright, see Circular 1, Copyright Basics. Note that if your recipe has secret ingredients that you do not want to reveal, you may not want to submit it for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records.

Deposit requirements depend on whether a work has been published at the time of registration:

If the work is unpublished, one complete copy
If the work was first published in the United States on or after January 1, 1978, two complete copies of the best edition
If the work was first published outside the United States, one complete copy of the work as first published
If the work is a contribution to a collective work and was published after January 1, 1978, one complete copy of the best edition of the collective work or a photocopy of the contribution itself as it was published in the collective work

FL-122, Reviewed December 2011

U.S. Copyright Office - Recipes

Circular 1 is available here: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/
 
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Je vais dormir plus sage ce soir...

so di - I think as OP your question is a bit moot... if a person chooses to copyright a recipe - go for it... as the laws already seem to exist... and you feel the urge to sue someone for infringement - go for it...

I still maintain it is only the lawyers who win.
 
dragnlaw, a person does not have to choose to copyright a recipe. A creative work such as a recipe is automatically copyrighted upon creation in fixed form. A person can choose to register the copyright, which can make it easier to defend in court, but it's not necessary.

While you may believe that only lawyers "win," the fact is that copyright law is intended to encourage people to create by providing legal protection for their creations. So people win.
 
GG - in fact I understand exactly what you are saying... and I have no problem with that... but that having been said...

in a perfect world. ;) :rolleyes:
 
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