Copyrighting Food

A friend tossed this tidbit of news my way. Meg Hourihan of megnut.com responds to the Food & Wine article where Steve Shaw from eGullet.com proposes copyrighting recipes as a response to copycat chefs plagarizing recipes from other top chefs.

Says Pete Wells of Food & Wine: "Shaw told me he hoped to convene a summit meeting with some of the smartest people in the food world to hammer out a workable model for copyrighting food. First, he’d propose changing the copyright code, possibly by making cuisine a subdivision of the existing category for sculpture or acknowledging recipes as a form of literary expression. For enforcement, Shaw leans toward creating a system like ASCAP, an association that collects composers’ royalties for public performances of songs—on the radio, in nightclubs and so on."

Although this is not meant to copyright grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, I do hope this will pass as an interesting thought-experiment but not actually implemented. (Even Steve Shaw admits it's unlikely to work.) As Meg at megnut.com wrote, "Copyright goes against the whole spirit of what we all do and love. Cooking is all about giving so others feel good!"

Check out the complete Food & Wine article for the full scoop.

Comments

[RobynT]

wow, i actually had a question sort of related to this and have been looking for someone to answer it. i am thinking of starting a food blog but i wonder what you need to worry about as far as posting recipes that you've found in cookbooks. do you just say where you got it?

[Joe]

The deal on recipes and copyright is this: copyright protects the expression of an idea, if there's sufficient creativity, but not the underlying idea itself. (If you want to protect an idea, you need a patent.) Thus, the recipe itself is not protected by copyright. The way the recipe is phrased might be, in the rare cases where it's more than just plain descriptive language, but most aren't.

In addition, there's a basic fair use principle in US copyright law that permits the use of a small portion of a work without permission for the purpose of review and commentary. One recipe is a small portion of any cookbook, so in the unlikely event that a recipe's wording would be considered sufficiently creative to trigger copyright protection, there's still a fair use argument.

KC posts individual recipes, not only with credit to the author, but also with a link to the cookbook they came from so people who are interested can go buy the book. But she doesn't post the stories that go with them, or scan photos from the cookbook. As a matter of fact, many people follow those links and buy the books -- so what she's doing is not only legitimate under US law, but actually beneficial to the authors of the books she cites.

I can't find eGullet's policy, but I'm pretty sure they've taken a similar line. (They allow posting of recipes, but insist that you give credit. They may also ask people to paraphrase in some cases.)