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Food taste 'not protected by copyright' rules EU court
- nmstoker 8y agoFunny the article made no mention of smell, which one might suspect would be treated in a similar way.
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoIn the United States, smell copyright is well-established case law. Smells can be copyrighted if they're not a functional part of the product. Perfume no, smell added to shovels to distinguish your brand, sure. Edit: Trademark, not copyright, damn it!
- mey 8y agoIs that copyright or trademark?
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoYes, trademark. I don't know what possessed me.
- Angostura 8y agoPlaydoh recently managed to trademark its smell.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThat's interesting, I thought the smell was a result of the ingredients - which would make it non-distinctive and unsuitable for a trademark (as others would be excluded from making the product so the trademark would operate as a perpetual patent). Maybe the smell is a trademark only for other goods (I don't know what Class Playdoh falls in, toys?), eg Playdoh scented merch? On searching I found an informed, brief treatment here https://loweringthebar.net/2018/05/play-doh-smell-trademarked.html https://loweringthebar.net/2018/05/play-doh-smell-trademarke....
- type0 8y agoit's IP - i.e impossible plonkers
- ummonk 8y agoThat's surprising. Smells to distinguish your brand seems more like a trademark than a copyright...
- reality_czech 8y agoIf Oracle gets its way, code smells will be copyrightable as well.
- JDWolf 8y agosmells like burnt money
- r00fus 8y agov11i smells like software license audits.
- PunchTornado 8y agothey have plenty
- techdragon 8y agoIs it actually copyright or a protection similar to trade dress like the use of a specific colour delivery vans and matching uniforms.
- maxxxxx 8y agoMakes me wonder, is there any formal representation for smells like we have with colors?
- tyingq 8y agoNot in English, but...http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/01/15/this-language-names-odors-as-precisely-as-english-speakers-name-color/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/01/15/this-la...
- oneplane 8y agoI think one of the problems is that color and what you see is somewhat tightly related where taste and how taste works is highly varied. While you can get some sort of single-molecule chemical representation of some specific smell or taste, that would be static (as in, the formula or construction wouldn't change) but most people would smell different things. I suppose for those 'inventions' the recipe or method would be trademarked/copyrighted/patented but not the result.
- frozenport 8y agoNow, you might be shocked to learn that color can be part of us design patents.
- ergothus 8y agoThere is a whole world of professional "noses" used by perfume companies. They have a system for describing "notes" but I know far too little (and honestly, don't want to know more) to say more than that.
- donkeyd 8y agoThe same for wine. However, research has shown that adding red food coloring to white wine, causes people to smell the notes that are usually smelled in red wine. [0] [0] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
- emilfihlman 8y agoThis is a strange common sense ruling from the EU, which is most often the lapdog of copyright trolls.
- jopsen 8y agoTrolling much? :) The EU does stupid things from time to time, but generally I think the EU gets things reasonably right.. Getting rid of roaming charges was huge! Not adding software parents was huge! GDRP has pros/cons, mostly it's a problem that people think they comply by making consent popups. But yes, aspect of current copyright reform and cookie law is stupid. But only aspects -- who knows maybe we can fix them :)
- toyg 8y agoOn food, EU authorities don’t mess about. There is a complicated set of regulations to mark “characteristic” food, which is enforced very rigorously across the continent. The problem seems to be that such regulations mostly cover traditional foodstuffs, whereas modern industrial concoctions (like this crappy cheese) are ignored. Claiming copyright was a somewhat-clever attempt to extend protections.
- mrob 8y agoThe EU protected designation of origin etc. rights are effectively trademarks, so unlike copyrights or patents there's no harm to consumers. You're free to introduce competing products with the same taste under a different name, e.g. Champagne has to be produced in Champagne in France with specific ingredients and technique, but Spain produces Cava, which is almost identical.
- foobar1962 8y agoIn Australia we make "Sparkling Wine."
- etiennemarcel 8y agoYou can buy "mousseux" (bubbly) from anywhere in France that will taste the same as most Champagnes.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoWell, different people have different taste buds, how are you going to make sure there is a universally agreed representation, of taste?
- mygo 8y agowell different people have different retinas, how are you going to make sure there is a universally agreed representation, of a colored trademark =p https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08
- qaminsod 8y agoPeople have different interpretations of the world, how are you going to make sure of anything?
- akira2501 8y agoYou don't need to.. you have a reference standard and a mechanical means of comparison. Now we're not quibbling over the multitude of interpretations but over a single repeatable test and a single output number.
- baddox 8y agoI doubt that’s how hardly any digital IP protection works. Surely arbitrary encodes or slight pitch/tempo/etc. transformations of a digital music file are not protected if they are deemed to be equivalent to listeners. Surely any mechanical (algorithmic) detection mechanism could be circumvented if you know the mechanism, and yet I’m pretty sure a judge will still just look at it with “common sense.”
- mygo 8y agoYep you can make sense of it. Everyone can, and does. It happens every time cars stop at a red stop light. I don’t know how red looks to you, but every time you see red, you know it’s red. Even if red looks to you like green looks to me, when we both approach a red stop light we will both stop. We can be sure of that. Even though we may perceive the same red stop light differently, we can still interpret it to mean “stop”. Same for taste. You know when you’re eating a Big Mac and when you’re not. Even if it tastes different to you than it does for me. And more importantly, a Big Mac tastes like a Bic Mac to you every time. The results are repeatable, so long as you’re the constant. So yep perception is inconsistent between people, but within an individual you do have consistency. The individual is the reference point. Anyways hope people don’t take this as some sort of endorsement for trademarking taste. It’s more of an observation about the nature of perception.
- type0 8y agoCopyRighteousness strikes again, how long will it take before someone could copyright the air?
- jpatokal 8y agoQuite the opposite: the EU found that you cannot copyright food tastes.
- type0 8y agoYes, sure. Just shows that their lobbying was ineffective, better luck next time.
- aaron695 8y agoSo I could spend millions designing and displaying an amazing art piece, using something like fireworks and I should have zero protections. Your argument holds to books and video equally so I think we should talk about that issue on the common rather than rarer forms of art like using air to create a thing of value. Speaking of air but not copyright, obviously the current default composition of air is not optimal for humans. One does wonder how many billions of lives get cut short because of it, what is the optimal level of oxygen the body needs? But I see little incentive to find what it would be since it could not be protected financially. So we get relegated to simplistic meta studies on things like additives aka PM 2.5. There are reasons we have protections for intellectual property. They are not jokes.
- cpach 8y agoIt strikes me as very odd that anyone would even try argue in court that food could be compared to photography, literature, music or film.
- beefhash 8y agoCopyright has become the catch-all kind of intellectual property if nothing more specific is available. It's grotesque what it's become, but that's just how it is.
- cpach 8y agoI agree. Some people seem fond of trying to use copyright as a tool to prevent competition, but of course that’s not at all what it was intended for.
- mdpopescu 8y agoEr... preventing competition and aiding censorship are exactly what it was created for [1] [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
- cyborgx7 8y agoAll discussions on the legitimacy of intellectual property are basically mute until the protection periods go back to something reasonable of at most 20 years.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoHmm, the Licensing of the Press Act to me is not copyright, it doesn't prevent copying, it prevents the use of printing presses IIRC. It also addresses sedition. The Statute of Anne includes the deal of provision of copies on deposit to named libraries, and of entry to the public domain; education and availability of publications are specific aims. It provides a reward period of up to 14 years (the cost of printing being considerable), and then entry to the public domain making for easy and open competition. It would be like saying today that a monopoly period of 14 months on a book was inhibiting competition - such a period allows recovery of costs, and so aids the dissemination of literary and artistic works by make it cost-effective. Yes, it inhibits competition, but key to the other aims is that this inhibition is limited in order to provide a genuine, timely benefit to the public.
- lixtra 8y agoThis is surprising since food is one of the oldest subjects of “IP” in Europe: > [Sybaris around 700 BC] pioneered the concept of intellectual property to ensure that cooks could exclusively profit from their signature dishes for a whole year. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybaris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybaris
- ElBarto 8y agoCooking recipes aren't protected as far as I remember so it would have been surprising to protect the end result.
- beatgammit 8y agoThat seems to be true for the most part, but if your recipe contains a lengthy narrative or something, the work as a whole could be covered by copyright[1]. I've seen this in a lot of blogs and recipe books, but I don't know how far it extends, and I'm sure someone could extract just the base recipe from the narrative and the derivative work wouldn't violate copyright. - [1] https://paleoflourish.com/recipe-copyright/#protected https://paleoflourish.com/recipe-copyright/#protected
- ElBarto 8y agoYes, but in that case the copyright extends to the literary work, not the recipe (i.e. the technical process) itself. Once you have published a cooking recipe you cannot prevent anyone from recreating the dish by following that recipe, even restaurants.
- wiz21c 8y agoYup. In Europe you don't copyright "ideas" but expressions of them. If a whistle a song and you make a song out of it and sell millions of copies, then I can't claim anything. Now, if I have a sheet of music with that tune written on it, that predates your own version, then I win. That's made to ensure that ideas are free to flow. That's very good for auhtors (and society in general, as far as I'm concerned)
- anticensor 8y agoThat is not a problem. They would invent a chemical footprint IP right to cover.
- simonh 8y agoEven assuming it can be specified precisely enough, they would have to ensure their own product always fell within the footprint, and if the rival product deviated even slightly from it - but not enough to taste significantly different - they would be fine. But of course to work to do all this would be fantastically expensive in practice, which is a whole other major problem,
- anticensor 8y agoI think you can describe a group or mixture of chemicals in a chemical footprint in its particular chemical properties, for example, "an alkane chain of 80-85 carbons with an alcohol bound on carbon no. 21 and an ethyl-keto bond on second to the last carbon". Does not have to single out a chemical.
- simonh 8y agoHow many such chemicals and variations on them are found in, say, as single one of the herbs in the cheese in question? But then it's not just about the raw chemicals in say the herb plant cells, it's also about their structure and relationship with each other. If you just took a list of all the chemical compounds in say the cells of a herb plant leaf and synthesized them in a chemical slurry I doubt it would taste much like the herb. Which chemicals in the leaf fragments actually evaporate causing the smell? Which ones diffuse into the cheese, and how does the structure mediate that?
- Siemer 8y agoIt's also worth noting that Heksenkaas is a ridiculously overpriced product, which probably explains why they are trying so hard to keep the competition at bay.
- Freak_NL 8y agoI've bought it on sale, but it's just not that appealing. Definitely overpriced.
- contravariant 8y agoIt's somewhat unfortunate that the ruling merely reasons that it wouldn't be practically possible, rather than reasoning that such a copyright would be a burden on society without any real gain.
- tantalor 8y agoIsn't that a stronger argument? The reason you aren't allowed to hunt unicorns is that they don't exist, not that they are sentient creatures.
- contravariant 8y agoNot being able to enforce a law is a pretty weak argument. Hunting unicorns isn't the best comparison as that one would be fairly easy to enforce. If you're more concerned with the unenforceability than the consequences of enforcing a law then something has gone wrong. Going back to your example, a law against hunting sentient creatures would make sense regardless of the fact that establishing sentience is a hard philosophical problem.
- euyyn 8y agoNot being able to enforce a specific aspect of copyright law led in the 80's to pretty much all countries having to reform their laws. When home VCRs became commonplace, creating an automatic copy of a broadcast was still illegal. Some German high court ruled that people's right to privacy in their own homes trumped law enforcement's interest in enforcing copyright, so the law was unenforceable in those cases. Hence was born the exemption for "copies for private use", and the related "tax" applied to sales of VCRs (and later on, blank CDs and DVDs) that was used to pay off author associations.