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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

Ingredients lists are not copyrightable. The text and photos around them can be (as in a recipe book or blog).

“A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.”

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

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I’ve always wondered about this. Say you get the recipe and translate it using ML to another language but with fuzzy logic so it’s not identical to the original. And has added or missing text or parts of text.

Would that be breach of copyright? Do you hold the copyright over the new content? Can you claim the original was just inspiration and there are enough differences between the two items?

This is all covered under derivative works for copyright, you can't take ownership of something just by changing some things. The copyright office has a summary of derivative works here: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

no, because the core _recipe_ part of the post isn't copyrightable. The descriptive stuff around it is.

> ...where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions...

re what @qw3rty01 said, ... It only applies if you're including all the stuff _around_ the core recipe.

This is why there are so many recipe apps that scrape web sites and don't get sued out of existence.

Source: Copyright.gov https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

opinionated side note: A recipe is a set of instructions on how to alter and combine foods. This is "obviously" not worthy of copyright. A set of instructions on how to combine and alter text on the other hand (99.999% of software) is 100% copyrightable

If you translated the whole cookbook, then it’s different from translating a single recipe.

A collection of recipes in a cookbook (copyrightable) seems the same category as a collection of recipes on a site.

Mere listing... no. But once you add quantities and a specific order or preparation, a list becomes a copyrightable work. The mere list reference is to the simple content lists we see on product labels.

Even the quantities and order of preparation are not inherently copyrightable. Per parent comment's citation, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression.

"Fill pitcher with water, add lemon juice and sugar" is not going to pass muster as "substantial literary expression".

But if I republished your 5 page story about how your grandma used to make this lemonade and you remember drinking it on the porch of her cottage on Cape Cod, then I would be infringing on your copyright.

Just the ingredients, quantities, and procedure explained in a factual manner is explicitly not copyrightable in the US:

> A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish.

Your explanations of why a process is followed, and other supplemental information beyond the instructions, can be copyrightable.

Substantial literary expression is old law, written when software was poorly understood by courts. Proceedures are now regularly copyrightable. They will find expression somewhere, even in a typo or apparant error (see the old phonebook and map cases). While one can pull and copy the facts, verbatum copying of every minutia is very dangerous.

Remember that a recipe isn't just an instruction set for making food. For purposes of copyright it is also letters on a page generated by a person.

Not in the United States.

Especially creative language describing the recipe might be. Like paragraphs of text about the cultural context or how much you like it, or even especially poetic langauge describing how to combine the ingredients.

But not the instructions for preparation themselves, not simple instructions of how combine things in what order. No matter how specific, they are considered to be facts rather than creative expression. "ideas, procedures, processes, systems, and methods of operation" are not protected by copyright -- no matter how useful, no matter how much energy went into making them, that is not the standard.

Other countries may have different legal status than USA

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