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> I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, wi

by cosmie 6y ago

> I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: Because they'd likely run afoul of copyright laws. A recipe in and of itself doesn't generally qualify for copyright protection, but a recipe cushioned in prose can be a copyrighted literary work. So anyone ripping the recipe out of it would infringe on the copyright of the literary work itself. See "How do I protect my recipe?" on [1]. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

derefr 6y ago
Copyright applies to the prose itself, though—the word choice and ordering. A site like the one I'm describing doesn't have to use the same words the original site uses. In fact, I'd really hope it wouldn't, since these sites almost never use a standardized vocabulary, and in fact try as hard as they can to make their recipes into interesting prose (i.e. using a different word in reference to something each time they reference it) at the expense of clarity. The "boiled-down form" of these recipes, would look less like prose text, and more like an RDF graph linking ingredient-noun vertices together using action-verb edges. In fact, now that I think about it, it could probably be stored in a format machine-readable enough to function equally well as machinima choreography for a "cooking simulator", i.e. an HTML5 canvas app with an engine approximating a cooking game (e.g. Cooking Mama) but without the "game" part. Such a "timeline view" of the recipe could actually keep track of the collection of pots/pans/bowls/etc. required in the recipe, and then visually display the current state of what's in each of them at each step, as you scroll through each step in the recipe's timeline. Like a visual debugger, for food. The textual representation of the recipe would just be generated from that same non-textual data format, via a simple structured NLP rule-set. (Yes, you could instead throw the sort of algorithms they're using to generate baseball news coverage[1] at the problem, but we want standardized text, not stylized text.) Bonus: i18n for free. The normalized recipe data isn't "in" any language, so it's equally easy to write a ruleset for generating recipe-step prose that is in any language. The resultant text of such a generative process shouldn't be copyright-infringing, even if it matched some other recipe word-for-word by coincidence. When you "extract" only the bare facts from a work and discard the rest, you're not making a derivative work; a work of yours that employs those "extracted" facts is not a derivative of the source of those facts. (If it were, then every summary or review of a work, would be in violation of the copyright of the work it's summarizing or reviewing, since the bare facts referenced were gleaned from the original work.) [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-sports-coverage-with-stories-written-by-machines/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-...
- cosmie 6y ago
  Copyright applies to the literary work as a whole, and protects derivative works based on it[1]. In this case it's true the derivative work (the recipe) wouldn't be copyrightable, but that doesn't absolve it from being considered a copyright violation of the original work. If you can show you independently created that recipe, then you're protected from the above assertion that it was a derivative of that copyrighted work. But if you're compiling a database of normalized recipes via scraping recipe content online, it'd be pretty easy for a copyright holder to establish this argument doesn't hold water. [1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/copyright-for-literary-work/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
  - derefr 6y ago
    Aren't prose recipes a kind of program source-code; and aren't the underlying ideas of their steps, algorithms? The law says you can copyright source code, but not a program's underlying algorithmic semantics[1]. What I'm talking about here, is effectively "extracting the semantics of someone else's source code/recipe, in a way where humans are "firewalled off" from the particulars of the original prose of the code/recipe; and then using the described semantics to write your own code/recipe that has those same semantics." This is explicitly something that's been decided as not copyright-infringing; which is why IP lawyers have to go after cases where there was literal plagiarism of source code, however small. The big example of this is Google v. Oracle, where API header files used in Android were literally plagiarized from OpenJDK. Google argued that this was fair use, as there was essentially no other form these files could take while retaining Java compatibility. But this argument was shut down/never resolved in their favor. All Google had to do, in the end, to avoid infringement, was to do a ground-up rewrite of those Android API header files (which ended up almost exactly the same as they were before the rewrite.) Note that they still rewrote them using an understanding of the bare facts that those header files contain, that could only have been gained by reading the original header files themselves. And yet the new derivative work, being "not literally plagiarism", was no longer considered an infringing derivative work. [1] You can patent algorithms (sort of, as business processes), but that's a different thing. Nobody's ever going to sue a recipe website for patent infringement, even if they described Nestle's patented chocolate-enrobing technique, because a description of a patented process is not a use of that patent. Patents are inherently public information, and people can share and reprint the information in them around all they like. Instead, a patent owner would only sue other companies who used the patented technique for commercial gain, for not first acquiring a license for the patented technique. (Google never sued bloggers for describing the PageRank algorithm; but up until last year, Google did sue other search-engine companies for implementing PageRank without a license.)

by cosmie 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

Copyright applies to the prose itself, though—the word choice and ordering. A site like the one I'm describing doesn't have to use the same words the original site uses. In fact, I'd really hope it wouldn't, since these sites almost never use a standardized vocabulary, and in fact try as hard as they can to make their recipes into interesting prose (i.e. using a different word in reference to something each time they reference it) at the expense of clarity. The "boiled-down form" of these recipes, would look less like prose text, and more like an RDF graph linking ingredient-noun vertices together using action-verb edges. In fact, now that I think about it, it could probably be stored in a format machine-readable enough to function equally well as machinima choreography for a "cooking simulator", i.e. an HTML5 canvas app with an engine approximating a cooking game (e.g. Cooking Mama) but without the "game" part. Such a "timeline view" of the recipe could actually keep track of the collection of pots/pans/bowls/etc. required in the recipe, and then visually display the current state of what's in each of them at each step, as you scroll through each step in the recipe's timeline. Like a visual debugger, for food. The textual representation of the recipe would just be generated from that same non-textual data format, via a simple structured NLP rule-set. (Yes, you could instead throw the sort of algorithms they're using to generate baseball news coverage[1] at the problem, but we want standardized text, not stylized text.) Bonus: i18n for free. The normalized recipe data isn't "in" any language, so it's equally easy to write a ruleset for generating recipe-step prose that is in any language. The resultant text of such a generative process shouldn't be copyright-infringing, even if it matched some other recipe word-for-word by coincidence. When you "extract" only the bare facts from a work and discard the rest, you're not making a derivative work; a work of yours that employs those "extracted" facts is not a derivative of the source of those facts. (If it were, then every summary or review of a work, would be in violation of the copyright of the work it's summarizing or reviewing, since the bare facts referenced were gleaned from the original work.) [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-sports-coverage-with-stories-written-by-machines/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/01/associated-press-expands-...

cosmie 6y ago
Copyright applies to the literary work as a whole, and protects derivative works based on it[1]. In this case it's true the derivative work (the recipe) wouldn't be copyrightable, but that doesn't absolve it from being considered a copyright violation of the original work. If you can show you independently created that recipe, then you're protected from the above assertion that it was a derivative of that copyrighted work. But if you're compiling a database of normalized recipes via scraping recipe content online, it'd be pretty easy for a copyright holder to establish this argument doesn't hold water. [1] https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/copyright-for-literary-work/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
- derefr 6y ago
  Aren't prose recipes a kind of program source-code; and aren't the underlying ideas of their steps, algorithms? The law says you can copyright source code, but not a program's underlying algorithmic semantics[1]. What I'm talking about here, is effectively "extracting the semantics of someone else's source code/recipe, in a way where humans are "firewalled off" from the particulars of the original prose of the code/recipe; and then using the described semantics to write your own code/recipe that has those same semantics." This is explicitly something that's been decided as not copyright-infringing; which is why IP lawyers have to go after cases where there was literal plagiarism of source code, however small. The big example of this is Google v. Oracle, where API header files used in Android were literally plagiarized from OpenJDK. Google argued that this was fair use, as there was essentially no other form these files could take while retaining Java compatibility. But this argument was shut down/never resolved in their favor. All Google had to do, in the end, to avoid infringement, was to do a ground-up rewrite of those Android API header files (which ended up almost exactly the same as they were before the rewrite.) Note that they still rewrote them using an understanding of the bare facts that those header files contain, that could only have been gained by reading the original header files themselves. And yet the new derivative work, being "not literally plagiarism", was no longer considered an infringing derivative work. [1] You can patent algorithms (sort of, as business processes), but that's a different thing. Nobody's ever going to sue a recipe website for patent infringement, even if they described Nestle's patented chocolate-enrobing technique, because a description of a patented process is not a use of that patent. Patents are inherently public information, and people can share and reprint the information in them around all they like. Instead, a patent owner would only sue other companies who used the patented technique for commercial gain, for not first acquiring a license for the patented technique. (Google never sued bloggers for describing the PageRank algorithm; but up until last year, Google did sue other search-engine companies for implementing PageRank without a license.)