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
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?
You could then make your recipe book searchable, sure.
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)
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
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
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
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.
> 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.
That is copyright infringement. See SAS Institute, Inc. v. S&H Comp. Sys., 605 F. Supp. 816 (M.D. Tenn. 1985)
A mechanical transformation of the recipe (say, converting it to all caps, or changing the font) will still be protected as a derivative work, just like the binaries for a computer program are protected as a derivative work.
A re-phrasing of the recipe in someone else's words which results in the same dish is not protected, just like a re-implementation of a piece of software is not protected.
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.
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
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.
I'm sure if you dig around enough you'll find really simple recipes that claim to be covered 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.
That's what a guy who made a book of trivia thought when he sued Trivial Pursuit for using all of his facts. Turned out, he was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivial_Pursuit#Fred_Worth_law...
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/827...
Worth's reliance on cases involving infringement of one directory by another, see, e.g., Leon v. Pacific Tel. & Tel. Co., 91 F.2d 484 (9th Cir. 1937) (telephone directories), or one list by another, see, e.g., Eckes v. Card Prices Update, 736 F.2d 859 (2d Cir. 1984), is not persuasive. In Leon, plaintiff's entire selection of names and numbers were copied and listed in numerical instead of alphabetical order. Leon, 91 F.2d at 484-85. In Eckes, the plaintiff published a list of 18,000 common baseball cards and selected 5,000 of those cards as "premium" cards; the defendant's listing selected substantially the same 5,000 cards as "premium" cards. Eckes, 736 F.2d at 860-61.
Current law restricts copying but doesn't protect ideas or facts.
Stupid laws are reaching tipping point to end.