4 ms·

I am amazed the article and the comments do not mention copyright. 1. You can’t copyright a recipe 2. You can copyright the text of a long winded story which

by graeme 4y ago

I am amazed the article and the comments do not mention copyright. 1. You can’t copyright a recipe 2. You can copyright the text of a long winded story which contains a recipe Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

TehShrike 4y ago
I've heard this explanation before but it sounds like one of those "it sounds plausible, so people will keep repeating it" explanations. I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff. > This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.
- graeme 4y ago
  Oh, to be clear: I agree! Google also rewards the fluff, you can show more ads, etc But the copyright is part of the equation and it deserves a mention. Also, part of google rankings is manual quality review, familiarity, etc. if a recipe site strongly diverges from the normal form it can confuse readers or quality rankers. The lack of copyright to a degree has influenced the form that is now industry standard.
noworld 4y ago
Weird thought - you can't copyright a recipe, but could you patent one?
- nkurz 4y ago
  Generally no. It's technically possible, but very few recipes would qualify for patent protection. Here's a decent summary article: Can I patent a recipe? The simple answer is no. While it is technically possible to obtain a patent on certain recipes, the likelihood and rate of patents being granted for recipes is so low that it is almost pointless to try and obtain one unless you own a chain of restaurants or are looking to franchise your business. The effort required to protect intellectual property, such as a secret recipe or cooking process, is so great, and there are so many hurdles one must clear, that the ends hardly justify the means. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-recipes-trade-secrets-and-patents.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-...
  - Double_a_92 4y ago
    To be fair that explanation only says that it's hard, expensive, and not worth it. It doesn't say if it's legally possible.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      To get a patent, you need to develop something that's not obvious to the average practitioner in the field. I imagine it's pretty hard to come up with a recipe that wouldn't be obvious to the average professional cook. And if you did, it would be pretty easy for someone to alter the recipe in a way that avoids infringement. And let's not even get started on how you'd enforce it. How many restaurants would let you in to observe them cooking? I'm guessing it's legally possible, but in practice it's probably not even close to being worth the effort.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
I don't see how this explains the situation. Your link states that even in a cookbook, which itself is copyrightable as a whole, the individual recipes are still not copyrightable even when part of the larger whole. > Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property The reason the site exists in the first place is for the recipes, and that intellectual content is not defendable.
- graeme 4y ago
  Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story. Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    That's mostly not what the recipe sites do though, they're not writing a long-winded story where you need to read carefully to decipher the actual ingredients. They're giving you 500 words of unrelated bullshit and then the recipe. If I recall correctly there are already SaaS which run on ML models to extract the actual recipe from text, and you could use those to get the data. Plus who really cares about individual recipes from randomblog.com, they rarely have anything new, just the 50000001 re-publishing of a traditional recipe.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    > Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story It's also objectively a harder to follow recipe (i.e. a worse one). But that isn't even what recipe sites too. Open up google search type in a dish name and hit "I'm feeling lucky". I just did it for "mushroom Alfredo", you won't believe what happened next. - The first thing below the subtitle is a "Jump to recipe" button. - What gets jumped is 6 screen widths of rambling interspersed with highly produced photos, 3/4 of which are clearly advertising shots for the company that sponsored this particular recipe. The fact that the very first thing is a "jump to recipe" button indicates to me that even the author knows that you (the reader) want the recipe and not whatever they're about to ramble about. So why include it then? It's certainly not about copyright, the author is actively helping you not read it. The conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that the text is there to a) sell as advertising space for food-related sponsors and b) for SEO (go read through the sentences, each one seems crafted to hit on a different reason why someone might search for this recipe). > Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller. It's true, but slap a celebrity's face on the cover, ghost write (or even chatgpt) a few hundred words of intro before each book and BAM you have a stereotipical book in the cooking section.

by graeme 4y ago

TehShrike 4y ago

I've heard this explanation before but it sounds like one of those "it sounds plausible, so people will keep repeating it" explanations. I suspect the real reason is what the author of the post claims – Google sends more readers to articles with lots of fluff. > This food blogger wrote about an experiment she conducted. She listened to some of her readers and actually tried just putting the recipe up top before everything else. All of the articles in her experiment went lower in the rankings.

graeme 4y ago
Oh, to be clear: I agree! Google also rewards the fluff, you can show more ads, etc But the copyright is part of the equation and it deserves a mention. Also, part of google rankings is manual quality review, familiarity, etc. if a recipe site strongly diverges from the normal form it can confuse readers or quality rankers. The lack of copyright to a degree has influenced the form that is now industry standard.

noworld 4y ago

Weird thought - you can't copyright a recipe, but could you patent one?

nkurz 4y ago
Generally no. It's technically possible, but very few recipes would qualify for patent protection. Here's a decent summary article: Can I patent a recipe? The simple answer is no. While it is technically possible to obtain a patent on certain recipes, the likelihood and rate of patents being granted for recipes is so low that it is almost pointless to try and obtain one unless you own a chain of restaurants or are looking to franchise your business. The effort required to protect intellectual property, such as a secret recipe or cooking process, is so great, and there are so many hurdles one must clear, that the ends hardly justify the means. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-recipes-trade-secrets-and-patents.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/57/protecting-your-...
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  To be fair that explanation only says that it's hard, expensive, and not worth it. It doesn't say if it's legally possible.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    To get a patent, you need to develop something that's not obvious to the average practitioner in the field. I imagine it's pretty hard to come up with a recipe that wouldn't be obvious to the average professional cook. And if you did, it would be pretty easy for someone to alter the recipe in a way that avoids infringement. And let's not even get started on how you'd enforce it. How many restaurants would let you in to observe them cooking? I'm guessing it's legally possible, but in practice it's probably not even close to being worth the effort.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

I don't see how this explains the situation. Your link states that even in a cookbook, which itself is copyrightable as a whole, the individual recipes are still not copyrightable even when part of the larger whole. > Any recipe site which did not contains stories would have no defendable intellectual property The reason the site exists in the first place is for the recipes, and that intellectual content is not defendable.

graeme 4y ago
Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story. Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller.
- luckylion 4y ago
  That's mostly not what the recipe sites do though, they're not writing a long-winded story where you need to read carefully to decipher the actual ingredients. They're giving you 500 words of unrelated bullshit and then the recipe. If I recall correctly there are already SaaS which run on ML models to extract the actual recipe from text, and you could use those to get the data. Plus who really cares about individual recipes from randomblog.com, they rarely have anything new, just the 50000001 re-publishing of a traditional recipe.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  > Yes but it is much harder to scrape and replicate a site’s essence if the instructions are laced in a story and the essence includes the story It's also objectively a harder to follow recipe (i.e. a worse one). But that isn't even what recipe sites too. Open up google search type in a dish name and hit "I'm feeling lucky". I just did it for "mushroom Alfredo", you won't believe what happened next. - The first thing below the subtitle is a "Jump to recipe" button. - What gets jumped is 6 screen widths of rambling interspersed with highly produced photos, 3/4 of which are clearly advertising shots for the company that sponsored this particular recipe. The fact that the very first thing is a "jump to recipe" button indicates to me that even the author knows that you (the reader) want the recipe and not whatever they're about to ramble about. So why include it then? It's certainly not about copyright, the author is actively helping you not read it. The conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that the text is there to a) sell as advertising space for food-related sponsors and b) for SEO (go read through the sentences, each one seems crafted to hit on a different reason why someone might search for this recipe). > Merely copying the recipes in a popular cookbook would not make for a bestseller. It's true, but slap a celebrity's face on the cover, ghost write (or even chatgpt) a few hundred words of intro before each book and BAM you have a stereotipical book in the cooking section.