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As I understand it, while a cooking process is not protected by copyright, the prose describing a recipe can be. So if the recipe is more than just a matter-of-fact exposition of instructions you'd have to rewrite it in your own words.

Yes, any creative expression in the recipe might be protected by copyright.

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

"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."

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.

The answer is, it's complicated, but:

> 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.

> If I removed comments and/or translated the code in a literal manner

That is copyright infringement. See SAS Institute, Inc. v. S&H Comp. Sys., 605 F. Supp. 816 (M.D. Tenn. 1985)

The text of a recipe is protected by copyright, just like the source code for a computer program is protected.

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.

> A recipe can not be protected 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.

> This is one of the reasons that online recipe pages have turned in to long personal stories with (incidentally)

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

it is super annoying. And then when you get to the bottom, the recipe itself is an animated gif

And I don't mind a bit of story telling. Or background on why something is done a certain way etc. But we don't need a memoir

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...

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?

In theory, if you stripped out absolutely all of the content except for the bare ingredients-list-and-procedures of the recipes (possibly you would also have to drop the names), you could make a recipe book called "all of the recipes ever published in any of the 140 most popular languages" and you'd be fine.

You could then make your recipe book searchable, sure.

This is super interesting to me, and was not something I knew about before. This is probably a naive train of thought, but can recipes be patented? It would be very interesting if not. Because in my mind a recipe patent would be very similar to a software patent. It's describing a way to put code together to produce a desired outcome.

I'm not an IP lawyer, I just play one on the interwebz, so don't pretend like this is legal advice, but:

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)

Taco Bell succesfully patented the hexagonal tortilla folding pattern they use for Crunch Wrap Supremes.

That's fascinating. Was that a design or utility patent?

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

Funnily enough, because of this similarity the un-patentability of a cooking recipe was a frequently used example to hightlight the absurdity of patenting software in the campaign against software patents in Europe.

"A recipe can not be protected by copyright"

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.

This is an area of law which is still emerging.

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

It hardly seems like a coincidence that RMS has spent years advocating for sharing software by comparing it to sharing recipes.

When it comes to actual recipes, I find that most things I like come from a lot of repetition to adjust the details and figure out the pitfalls, so even if it's generally similar to what was published, a lot of value has been added from my perspective.

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 think for the same reason as the recipe, this one line calling of a Windows API wouldn't be covered by copyright. As I understand it, once the code is entirely functional and is unable to express any creativity you could argue it isn't covered by copyright as it exists as a fact.

I'm sure if you dig around enough you'll find really simple recipes that claim to be covered by copyright.

In fact, there is valuable and original content in writing that you should call this API function in those circumstances. But it's not embodied in the code. Once you've been to the page, it's in your head, and you can either remember it or write about it somewhere, neither of which, presumably, would be legally actionable.