5 ms·

The classic example of this in copyright law is the recipe. A recipe can not be protected by copyright. This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages ha

by vanniv 7y ago

The classic example of this in copyright law is the recipe. A recipe can not be protected by copyright. This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally) a recipe at the bottom. A recipe book, however, does have protection -- due to the creative work found in organizing the recipes, choosing which ones to include and to out near each other, and any creative work associated with introductions, photos, or other new expression. That means that legally, you could buy a ton of recipe books, and then make your own by copying and pasting just the ones you like. You could use the recipes unchanged, but you can't reuse the photos or any descriptive text, or anything but the bare recipe. Similar logic should apply to the publication or reuse of bare facts. Of course, law is complicated and nuanced, and lawyers/judges/legislators don't always understand new technology well enough to apply existing principles properly to new worlds

paulie_a 7y ago
> This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally) One of the most annoying features of a cooking site, a ten page story about your childhood Michigan is not necessary for a peach pie recipe
- vanniv 7y ago
  it is super annoying. And then when you get to the bottom, the recipe itself is an animated gif
  - paulie_a 7y ago
    And I don't mind a bit of story telling. Or background on why something is done a certain way etc. But we don't need a memoir
thebenedict 7y ago
That means that legally, you could buy a ton of recipe books, and then make your own by copying and pasting just the ones you like. You could use the recipes unchanged... At the scale of Google Books, we're not talking about using copyrighted recipes unchanged or copying and pasting. If you buy a ton of cookbooks, scan them, make them searchable by the world and derive new information about cooking from analyzing them, can you profit from the derived knowledge? Should that change if the publisher or author made an active decision not to make their content available electronically, or asked you to exclude them from your analysis?
- vanniv 7y ago
  In theory, if you stripped out absolutely all of the content except for the bare ingredients-list-and-procedures of the recipes (possibly you would also have to drop the names), you could make a recipe book called "all of the recipes ever published in any of the 140 most popular languages" and you'd be fine. You could then make your recipe book searchable, sure.
thefreeman 7y ago
This is super interesting to me, and was not something I knew about before. This is probably a naive train of thought, but can recipes be patented? It would be very interesting if not. Because in my mind a recipe patent would be very similar to a software patent. It's describing a way to put code together to produce a desired outcome.
- vanniv 7y ago
  I'm not an IP lawyer, I just play one on the interwebz, so don't pretend like this is legal advice, but: Yes, technically, you could patent a recipe, provided that it was sufficiently novel and sufficiently non-obvious to a practitioner of ordinary skill in the art. An ordinary recipe that only takes well-known ingredients and combines them in well-understood ways, applying well-known techniques is going to have a difficult time passing either the novelty or non-obviousness tests. I would anticipate that, if your recipe-based patent application were to prevail, that your recipe would need to include some preparation steps that are themselves new and unusual. For example, if you described a novel method of processing an ingredient, or a novel way of combining two ingredients that relied on some previously-unexplored aspect of their chemistry (such as making use of the small ash content of coconut milk products, for example)
  - hedora 7y ago
    Taco Bell succesfully patented the hexagonal tortilla folding pattern they use for Crunch Wrap Supremes.
    - vanniv 7y ago
      That's fascinating. Was that a design or utility patent? Oh dear me, it was a utility patent. They spent years trying to get it approved and ultimately abandoned the application (presumably realizing they were never going to get it) Application #US20080020106A1
- yosamino 7y ago
  Funnily enough, because of this similarity the un-patentability of a cooking recipe was a frequently used example to hightlight the absurdity of patenting software in the campaign against software patents in Europe.
mantap 7y ago
As I understand it, while a cooking process is not protected by copyright, the prose describing a recipe can be. So if the recipe is more than just a matter-of-fact exposition of instructions you'd have to rewrite it in your own words.
- vanniv 7y ago
  Yes, any creative expression in the recipe might be protected by copyright. And dish names might be protectable as trademarks, especially if they are not merely descriptions of the foodstuff. The ingredients list and preparation steps, or any other text which is purely functional and without a creative component, is what is not protectable. Interestingly, computer code is generally copyright protected, despite being literally steps a machine follows to perform a task. Courts have ruled that, because there are so many different ways to express any software of nontrivial size, the way the code is written (including comments, variable names, organization, etc ) represents sufficient creative expression to be protected. I'm actually somewhat surprised that binaries still get the protection, especially since with modern compiler optimizations, it seems like any creative expression your code would be gone by the time the compiler was done with it. But hey, as I said above, law is strange
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "Courts have ruled that, because there are so many different ways to express any software of nontrivial size, the way the code is written (including comments, variable names, organization, etc ) represents sufficient creative expression to be protected." If I removed comments and/or translated the code in a literal manner, I'm sure it would still qualify as plagiarism in school. Are you implying that it would not or should not be a copyright violation in that case? I have no idea legally, but I would assume the worst.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      The answer is, it's complicated, but: > If I removed comments and/or translated the code in a literal manner, I'm sure it would still qualify as plagiarism in school. What's plagiarism and copyright violation have nothing to do with each other. Academics routinely copy large segments of text and rely on fair use exemptions to avoid breaching copyright. Meanwhile, copying a couple innocuous sentences can rise to be plagiarism when it would not be a substantive copyright violation.
perl4ever 7y ago
"A recipe can not be protected by copyright" And how many introductions to programming compare a program to a recipe? Yet programs are copyrightable. If you're using logic, you already have lost. I found an amusing web page today - someone wrote a book on programming for Windows, and also has a website, and on a particular page, they have a helpful snippet of code, which is really just a wrapper/reference to a Windows system call. Literally one line, no additional logic. However, they have ~5 lines of copyright declaration above it, saying it is theirs and you can only use it if you buy their book. I thought this was really funny, given that they are essentially claiming a portion of the API defined by Microsoft just because they wrote a (pretty much the only possible) line that accesses it. It seems to be a controversial area of copyright recently.
- vanniv 7y ago
  This is an area of law which is still emerging. In my opinion, it is emerging very foolishly and nonsensically, but it is still emerging, and so much of it is not completely settled. Oracle V Google, for example, raised and then incompletely answered some questions like these
- catalogia 7y ago
  It hardly seems like a coincidence that RMS has spent years advocating for sharing software by comparing it to sharing recipes.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    When it comes to actual recipes, I find that most things I like come from a lot of repetition to adjust the details and figure out the pitfalls, so even if it's generally similar to what was published, a lot of value has been added from my perspective. Code can be written deliberately in a kind of unfinished, unrefined way, and let those who would use it go through a similar process. But the GPL seems significantly different from the absence of copyright.
- Arelius 7y ago
  I think for the same reason as the recipe, this one line calling of a Windows API wouldn't be covered by copyright. As I understand it, once the code is entirely functional and is unable to express any creativity you could argue it isn't covered by copyright as it exists as a fact. I'm sure if you dig around enough you'll find really simple recipes that claim to be covered by copyright.
beefield 7y ago
> A recipe can not be protected by copyright. Could some pro-IP person help me reconcile following statements: 1. If there was no copyright, "nobody" would write books/create art, thus we absolutely need to have copyright 2. Recipes have no copyright, but we are flooded by old and new recipes all the time. If you claim new recipes are somehow less work a daily comic strip, thus needing less protection, please consult a chef of a michelin starred restaurant about the need of the work to come up with new recipes.

by vanniv 7y ago

paulie_a 7y ago

> This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally) One of the most annoying features of a cooking site, a ten page story about your childhood Michigan is not necessary for a peach pie recipe

vanniv 7y ago
it is super annoying. And then when you get to the bottom, the recipe itself is an animated gif
- paulie_a 7y ago
  And I don't mind a bit of story telling. Or background on why something is done a certain way etc. But we don't need a memoir

thebenedict 7y ago

That means that legally, you could buy a ton of recipe books, and then make your own by copying and pasting just the ones you like. You could use the recipes unchanged... At the scale of Google Books, we're not talking about using copyrighted recipes unchanged or copying and pasting. If you buy a ton of cookbooks, scan them, make them searchable by the world and derive new information about cooking from analyzing them, can you profit from the derived knowledge? Should that change if the publisher or author made an active decision not to make their content available electronically, or asked you to exclude them from your analysis?

vanniv 7y ago
In theory, if you stripped out absolutely all of the content except for the bare ingredients-list-and-procedures of the recipes (possibly you would also have to drop the names), you could make a recipe book called "all of the recipes ever published in any of the 140 most popular languages" and you'd be fine. You could then make your recipe book searchable, sure.

thefreeman 7y ago

This is super interesting to me, and was not something I knew about before. This is probably a naive train of thought, but can recipes be patented? It would be very interesting if not. Because in my mind a recipe patent would be very similar to a software patent. It's describing a way to put code together to produce a desired outcome.

vanniv 7y ago
I'm not an IP lawyer, I just play one on the interwebz, so don't pretend like this is legal advice, but: Yes, technically, you could patent a recipe, provided that it was sufficiently novel and sufficiently non-obvious to a practitioner of ordinary skill in the art. An ordinary recipe that only takes well-known ingredients and combines them in well-understood ways, applying well-known techniques is going to have a difficult time passing either the novelty or non-obviousness tests. I would anticipate that, if your recipe-based patent application were to prevail, that your recipe would need to include some preparation steps that are themselves new and unusual. For example, if you described a novel method of processing an ingredient, or a novel way of combining two ingredients that relied on some previously-unexplored aspect of their chemistry (such as making use of the small ash content of coconut milk products, for example)
- hedora 7y ago
  Taco Bell succesfully patented the hexagonal tortilla folding pattern they use for Crunch Wrap Supremes.
  - vanniv 7y ago
    That's fascinating. Was that a design or utility patent? Oh dear me, it was a utility patent. They spent years trying to get it approved and ultimately abandoned the application (presumably realizing they were never going to get it) Application #US20080020106A1
yosamino 7y ago
Funnily enough, because of this similarity the un-patentability of a cooking recipe was a frequently used example to hightlight the absurdity of patenting software in the campaign against software patents in Europe.

mantap 7y ago

As I understand it, while a cooking process is not protected by copyright, the prose describing a recipe can be. So if the recipe is more than just a matter-of-fact exposition of instructions you'd have to rewrite it in your own words.

vanniv 7y ago
Yes, any creative expression in the recipe might be protected by copyright. And dish names might be protectable as trademarks, especially if they are not merely descriptions of the foodstuff. The ingredients list and preparation steps, or any other text which is purely functional and without a creative component, is what is not protectable. Interestingly, computer code is generally copyright protected, despite being literally steps a machine follows to perform a task. Courts have ruled that, because there are so many different ways to express any software of nontrivial size, the way the code is written (including comments, variable names, organization, etc ) represents sufficient creative expression to be protected. I'm actually somewhat surprised that binaries still get the protection, especially since with modern compiler optimizations, it seems like any creative expression your code would be gone by the time the compiler was done with it. But hey, as I said above, law is strange
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "Courts have ruled that, because there are so many different ways to express any software of nontrivial size, the way the code is written (including comments, variable names, organization, etc ) represents sufficient creative expression to be protected." If I removed comments and/or translated the code in a literal manner, I'm sure it would still qualify as plagiarism in school. Are you implying that it would not or should not be a copyright violation in that case? I have no idea legally, but I would assume the worst.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    The answer is, it's complicated, but: > If I removed comments and/or translated the code in a literal manner, I'm sure it would still qualify as plagiarism in school. What's plagiarism and copyright violation have nothing to do with each other. Academics routinely copy large segments of text and rely on fair use exemptions to avoid breaching copyright. Meanwhile, copying a couple innocuous sentences can rise to be plagiarism when it would not be a substantive copyright violation.

perl4ever 7y ago

"A recipe can not be protected by copyright" And how many introductions to programming compare a program to a recipe? Yet programs are copyrightable. If you're using logic, you already have lost. I found an amusing web page today - someone wrote a book on programming for Windows, and also has a website, and on a particular page, they have a helpful snippet of code, which is really just a wrapper/reference to a Windows system call. Literally one line, no additional logic. However, they have ~5 lines of copyright declaration above it, saying it is theirs and you can only use it if you buy their book. I thought this was really funny, given that they are essentially claiming a portion of the API defined by Microsoft just because they wrote a (pretty much the only possible) line that accesses it. It seems to be a controversial area of copyright recently.

vanniv 7y ago
This is an area of law which is still emerging. In my opinion, it is emerging very foolishly and nonsensically, but it is still emerging, and so much of it is not completely settled. Oracle V Google, for example, raised and then incompletely answered some questions like these
catalogia 7y ago
It hardly seems like a coincidence that RMS has spent years advocating for sharing software by comparing it to sharing recipes.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  When it comes to actual recipes, I find that most things I like come from a lot of repetition to adjust the details and figure out the pitfalls, so even if it's generally similar to what was published, a lot of value has been added from my perspective. Code can be written deliberately in a kind of unfinished, unrefined way, and let those who would use it go through a similar process. But the GPL seems significantly different from the absence of copyright.
Arelius 7y ago
I think for the same reason as the recipe, this one line calling of a Windows API wouldn't be covered by copyright. As I understand it, once the code is entirely functional and is unable to express any creativity you could argue it isn't covered by copyright as it exists as a fact. I'm sure if you dig around enough you'll find really simple recipes that claim to be covered by copyright.

beefield 7y ago

> A recipe can not be protected by copyright. Could some pro-IP person help me reconcile following statements: 1. If there was no copyright, "nobody" would write books/create art, thus we absolutely need to have copyright 2. Recipes have no copyright, but we are flooded by old and new recipes all the time. If you claim new recipes are somehow less work a daily comic strip, thus needing less protection, please consult a chef of a michelin starred restaurant about the need of the work to come up with new recipes.