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Comment by martimarkov | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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