Ravenwood - 10/15/07 09:30 PM
CNET reports on what might be the next big copyright battle: recipes.
Content tracking company Attributor recently conducted a study to get an idea of how frequently online recipes are copied and reposted to other sites. What it found might concern some recipe publishers. . .On the surface, 50% seems like an awfully low bar to meet. Under this standard, any recipe for Fish and Chips that includes fries, fish, and flour could be construed as a copyright violation. But I take this with a grain of salt because Attributor just wants to sell their recipe matching software. They are putting a bug in the ear of companies that publish recipes; telling them they're losing web traffic which translates into lost ad revenue.For the purposes of the study, Attributor researchers defined a match as any two recipes in which at least 50 percent of the content was identical. Then they looked more closely at the matches with low percentages of similarity and threw out those they thought couldn't be considered clear cases of copyright infringement.
But I wonder how enforceable said copyrights really are. Ingredients lists and recipes in general aren't copyrightable. That's why Coke doesn't publish their recipe or disclose their secret ingredients. All you would have to do is make enough of a change to get around the copyright without affecting the taste. But a recipe's text might be covered, and if they were copied verbatim a case could be made for infringement. Then there's this:
Another issue is that recipe sharing isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Dig around in just about any kitchen and you're sure to find a box full of recipes that have been copied from cookbooks and cooking magazines. Sharing recipes has been part of the culture of cooking for decades, if not centuries.Good recipes are closely guarded secrets for a reason. And by publishing a recipe it's implied that people are going to copy it, modify it, change it to suit their needs. And if big corporations start dragging grandmothers into court for posting their recipe collection on the web, there could be a serious backlash.
I believe recipes can actually be patented (but that protection is limited to a number of years). That's how corn dogs started.
I'd be worried about people slightly changing recipes without testing the effects.
Posted by: Alcibiades McZombie at October 16, 2007 12:05 AMDepends on whether you're baking or not. If you're just cooking, you can change the recipe to taste. If you're baking, changing it could be disastrous.
Posted by: Ravenwood at October 16, 2007 6:42 AMDon't you have to prove originality to protect anything more than the exact text? There's darn little worth eating that someone's great-grandmother didn't make first.
Posted by: markm at October 16, 2007 2:43 PMActually, recipes are the classic test in the IP legal world of what isn't copyrightable. Along with formulas, data, and measurements. The description can be copyrighted, but the method cannot. It is called a thin copyright, meaning that it is very specific. You pretty much have to copy substantial portions intact.
The classic example is the phone book. The listing in the phone book is not copyrighted. You can copy every single entry, verbatim, from the phone book and never violate the copyright if you add originality (like reorganizing it into different geographic areas or some method other than alphabetic.)
Posted by: Phelps at October 16, 2007 4:08 PMHi,
I work for Attributor and helped put together the study. You can get a little more context for our study on the Attributor blog - �A link is worth 1,000 words�
Your point about 50% being a low bar is a good one, particularly for recipes which is a tough category to quantify the amount of copying. Like you, we were skeptical of the initial results, but when we looked at the details, we were surprised to find so many word-for-word copies. Digging deeper, we found that most of these sites failed to link back or give attribution to the source.
I�m sure some of the copying was done unintentionally and without malice - our goal is to give rights holders visibility into how and where their content is being copied plus a set of flexible set of remedies such as sending a link request as we noted in our blog.
I hope that helps and yes we did this study to get some attention for our company - not necessarily for recipe companies to subscribe to our service (although that would be nice!) - more to show what our service can find on an interesting topic.
Posted by: Rich at October 16, 2007 9:35 PMHow about the ROADKILL RECIPIE BOOK or one by TED NUGENT and his wife KILL IT AND GRILL IT
Posted by: Spurwing Plover at November 4, 2007 8:12 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
