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Comment by desigooner | Hacker News Reader

Another factor that wasn't mentioned: Plagiarism. They often use Serious Eats recipes without any sort of attribution.

Edit: Some context: https://mic.com/articles/163958/the-secret-ingredient-to-buz...

Recipes are not copyrightable, and I'd argue that it's actually beneficial to all of us to exchange recipes freely and allow for commercial reuse. Food is an important and quantifiable part of our lives, and improving it is a collective effort. As I support scientific papers "theft" by Scihub, in the same way I support Buzzfeed propagating good food.

That doesn't answer the charge of plagiarism.

It's videos of people making food on Facebook. It's not an academic article. No one cares, it isn't actionable.

Plenty of olds have quaint ideas about giving credit where credit is due.

It is a video of a cartoon mouse named "Mickey" that only kids watch. It's not an academic article. No one cares, it isn't actionable.

Correct, that is a copyright violation. Based on the links above Tasty's videos are neither plagiarism, which is an offense in academia, but not commerce, nor Copyright, the commercial equivalent, which does not protect recipes.

Plagiarism has formal consequences in academia.

Taking credit for the work of others in any context is still plagiarism.

But do you understand that it's ethically wrong, regardless of whether or not it's illegal or formally defined? At a minimum, it's rude to copy someone's work without thanking them. You shouldn't need a higher authority to tell you this is wrong.

I'm not sure it's ethically wrong to take something in the public domain which holds no license or copyright whatsoever, and use it without attribution.

If snippets of the video were direct cuts from another show, that's a different story. But making a dish yourself and filming it is your own creation, I don't see why you have to thank anyone for it.

It is. It's benefiting from someone else's work without thanking them. This is basic elementary school ethics.

It's equivalent to performing a symphony, but not mentioning the music was written by Beethoven. Not illegal, but wrong, even if you don't explicitly claim it's your own work.

No, it's not. A symphony can be copyrighted.

It's the same as calculating force equals mass times acceleration, without thanking Newton every time. That's an example (natural law) which is always and immediately public domain, the same as recipes.

But Beethoven symphonies are not copyrighted, they've been in the public domain for centuries. Is it ok if you use Beethoven?

f=ma is an interesting example. I still think you should mention that it's Newton's Second Law if you're teaching it, and I doubt there's a textbook out there that doesn't. If Newton had discovered this law last year and you wrote a book about it without mentioning him, that would be deeply unethical.

I think outside of formal settings and in everyday life, it is common courtesy to give credit to people if you use their work or reference their ideas.

Providing proper attribution does not in any way prevent you from exchanging recipes freely.

Well, as Sci-hub doesn't push links to Elsevier in every paper they obtain, you shouldn't expect BuzzFeed attributing food blogs. However, I do not defend BuzzFeed's actions, and it would probably be better off for everyone if they contacted SeriousEats up front for a bit of exclusive content. But as an amateur chef and nutrition enthusiast, I'm all happy when interesting recipes get pushed beyond their original websites even in this sloppy manner.

I just gotta say, that's a really weird analogy to make.

The ingredient list isn't copyrightable but other parts of the recipe (like images or explanations of how/why to do things) are: https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

Is BuzzFeed copying those parts or replacing them with its own?

Also, related, it appears you can patent a recipe: https://www.uspto.gov/custom-page/inventors-eye-advice-1, though it wouldn't help much here.

I've come to realize there are very few actually good recipes online that don't come from a small number of websites. Serious Eats being a major one.

What are the other ones that you know of?

Food Wishes and Cooking With Dog have been really good, although some of the adapted recipes are so-so. Bon Appetit has pretty good recipes, but they post a lot of stuff I have no interest in eating or making.

The Kitchn. NY Times Cooking (which needs a subscription now). Cook's Illustrated (also a subscription).

It isn't just the recipes. They got called out for ripping off other ideas on YouTube last year. I guess originality is hard.

What should Serious Eats do about that? Include some fake ingredients like the fake streets included in maps?

Recipes typically aren't copyrightable. Source : https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

Recipes are. But the ingredient lists are not. The description are copyrightable as any other written work.

...and it wouldn't hurt anyone to give credit where credit is due.

IANAL but I believe you are wrong. Source :

“[The] recipes’ directions for preparing the assorted dishes fall squarely within the class of subject matter specifically excluded from copyright protection by 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).”

From : http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/publications_v_meredith.htm

The parent is correct and you are wrong, but they are being downvoted anyway which I expect to to happen to me as well.

“Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients….. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.”[0]

Clearly a cooking show or in my opinion a video showing the preparation of a dish in context and with commentary is protectable.

But all of the opinion on the internet matters about as much as wind striking the face of a mountain compared to an actual litigation.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

Maybe slightly alter the amounts to that they form a checksum of sorts...

Is putting ice cream in between two pieces of bacon a recipe?

It's interesting to see this shift in the web to blatant plagarism and copyright infringement. In the days before social media having dupe content was the mark of death for your Google page rank. Now that doesn't matter anymore because of social network sharing, so it's just become a gigantic cesspool of hacks feeding on hacks.

Are were sure Serious Eats didn't "steal" them from someone else?

Pretty sure you're weren't very familiar with Serious Eats when you wrote that, can you confirm this? I find it hard to believe that someone that cooks/reads Serious Eats would say that.

Yeah, I'm not. It was an honest question.

I'm not overly familiar with the website, but the few recipes from it I have come across are usually accompanied with an in-depth recount of the thought process that went into the recipe, including failed experiments and iterations, commentary on the origin of the dish and the author's experience with it, why a certain ingredient or technique was chosen in place of another, etc...

Look for Serious Eats recipes/articles about Ramen, Pizza or Yorkshire Pudding for some good examples.

It definitely looks and feels like OC (I really know nothing about Tasty, so I cannot comment on their alleged plagiarism).

Pretty regular reader from Serious Eats here. Kenji (the guy who is the culinary director), puts tons of scientific rigor into all of his recipes. What sets Serious Eats aparts from everyone else is they like to answer the 'why' of food. For example here is a super detailed story:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-h...

Asking if Kenji stole recipes is like asking if Modernist Cuisine stole recipes. You'd have to be unfamiliar with either to ask.

Hi I work for BuzzFeed engineering, but this is just me talking, not my company. The guy that started Tasty uses an empirical technique he devised in-house to come up with recipes people love. Wish I could say more than that. But I believe the "recipe space" he explores can come up with recipes that can at times look like previously published recipes. There are only so many combinations of ingredients that will click with the human palate. I guarantee you he's not directly ripping anyone off.

> I guarantee you he's not directly ripping anyone off.

You can understand why people might be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, given that in the past Buzzfeed has extensively plagiarized:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/editors-note-an-apology-to...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/buzzfee...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-vi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Stopera

Your citations quite literally mentions two people who wrote for BuzzFeed as far back as 2008, not even for Tasty.

Survivorship bias?

It must be a truly incredible formula to consistently produce the same results as when serious eats spends multiple iterations researching and developing a recipe and documenting the process.

Serious Eats just demos techniques from popular molecular gastronomy books. (They do at least mention this when they do it).

Give me a break.

>empirical technique he devised in-house to come up with recipes people love

This doesn't even mean anything. Empty words.

"An empirical technique to come up with recipes people love" includes "picking the most popular recipes from other websites."

To be fair, that's my empirical technique.

Hi Nick,

I get the impulse to defend the company you work for. It's commendable. But if you're embarrassed to see your employer be accused of plagiarism, it would be a lot more effective for you to pressure people internally to start providing proper attribution than to write comments like this. Internal pressure can often accomplish things that external pressure can't.

Good point. However, BuzzFeed's record on plagiarism is also being painted here with a very broad brush. The real occurrences of plagiarism at BuzzFeed is not out-of-keeping with normal attrition at major media dailies in the US media. Every news organization has had issues with it at some point or another. BuzzFeed is no different.

That said there's definitely always room for improvement.

I'm familiar with BuzzFeed's other "articles", and I've seen plenty of attribution there (e.g. articles that basically come straight from reddit, with each bullet point attributed to a reddit username, that always amuses me). I haven't actually watched any of the Tasty videos, so I haven't had a chance to see for myself if and when they get attributed, but if Kenji López-Alt is raging about Tasty on Twitter, then I have to assume there's a bit of a problem there.

However, when he first saw BuzzFeed’s recipe, published on their food site called Tasty, in May of this year, he said the ingredient list was nearly identical “with a few tweaks”. — Kenji López-Alt

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/buzzfeed-ac...

You can't copyright a list of ingredients.

And that's why he's not suing them for copyright violation. But just because something isn't a copyright violation doesn't mean it's not plagiarism, and doesn't mean that you shouldn't provide attribution.

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