4 ms·
Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical
by cycomanic 3y ago
Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. I guess cooks just didn't have the same lobby power to get their exception reworked (pharmaceuticals were in many places originally excluded from patents as well)
- interestica 3y agoA song is a recipe using ingredients we all have access to.
- jedmeyers 3y agoAnd thus we usually do not have patents for songs, only copyright protections.
- WrongAssumption 3y agoRecipes are not copyrightable either.
- throwway120385 3y agoI would think if you embedded a recipe for sugar cookies in a convoluted story about how you tried different kinds and amounts of butter, sugar, leavening, and flour that you could probably copyright the story and leave derivation of the recipe as an exercise for the reader.
- mschuster91 3y ago> I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. The effort required for validating them. Pharmaceutical compounds can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars just for the clinical trials and certifications of production steps, and on top of that comes the cost to failed attempts which are rolled into the pricing of products that do make the cut. A cooking recipe however, unless you're dealing with stuff like fugu fish, will not kill or injure those who replicate and eat it, and there's no regulatory hurdles to pass.
- COGlory 3y agoIt's worth pointing out industrial food preparation processes can be patented. Beyond Meat for instance: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015161099A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015161099A1/en
- bobthepanda 3y agoIf you could create a pharmaceutical via an alternate method, would that fall afoul of the original patent?
- nextaccountic 3y ago> It's worth pointing out industrial food preparation processes can be patented. How is it possible that this can be patented, but ordinary recipes can't? Everything is "industrial" if done in a scale large enough (note: the excerpt from the comment above this chain was about copyright, not patents)
- cactusfrog 3y agoIndustrial food preparation steps can be patented but they probably cannot be copyrighted.
- nextaccountic 3y agoI mean, it looks like culinary recipes by themselves should be able to be patented (not copyrighted, patented), regardless of whether they are "industrial" or not (I mean industrial is only about scale, you can have very complex processes in ordinary kitchens) Either this or processes to prepare food shouldn't be patented at all
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 8note 3y agoIs it the validation process that is then patentable as a new invention?