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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

You know why all these sites have pages of effluvia accompanying their recipes? Because lists of ingredients and steps are not copyrightable. A book of recipes, however, is copyrightable. On the web, to make the content copyrightable, they have to add stuff.

"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 was under the impression this was mainly to track user engagement for ad networks and search engines. Navigating to a page and leaving it open doesn't rank as highly for engagement; navigating to a page, scrolling through an article (which contains possible ads), and skipping back and forth between the ingredients list, steps, and explanatory text, is interpreted as higher engagement

This discussion is following every discussion of online recipes. Let me add my own argument: When I am looking for a specific recipe I am not interested in the extra content. However, when I am following a person's recipe blog I want to have that extra content. Having just a feed of recipes is just not that interesting as a collection of stories and accompanying recipes. The stories make it personal and it's nice to get glimpses into the life of the person doing the cooking. As a blogger it's also more fun to share more than recipes - you are writing a blog after all, not just a cookbook. If the ad revenue rises as a result of that - it's a nice bonus.

I'm certain that's part of it. Having a comment section and a way for users to "like" recipes certainly contributes to the ad serving model.

it's not really that. it's because of google's arcane search requirements. these authors want their results to appear high up in google search results and one of the ways to do it is to have all this accompanying text.

because their list of ingredients and steps are still not copyrightable even if all the surrounding text is.

Yeah it's definitely SEO fluff. No one is enforcing copyright on their blog's recipe. And another site can still extract the recipe portion anyway.

If you search for "Chicken Parmesan Recipe", what you get is the website optimized for appearing at the top of the search result list for "Chicken Parmesan Recipe". You don't get the best website, you don't get the best recipe, you don't even get something with unique content. The only way copyright helps is it allows you to send nastygrams to Google in your fight to remain on top. Doesn't seem to me to be all that important compared to the SEO and ad-based monetization to afford to work on SEO. You'd probably get the same kind of sites and the exact same recipes in search results if copyright wasn't a thing. Only difference is that the fluff would be copied outright and the copy-and-SEO-optimize site might place above the "original" source.

Interesting thing is that more or less the same applies to electronic schematics, that's why companies no longer add them to service manuals as the connections between components can be freely copied. Only thing that you can copyright is the layout or PCB traces, but not as a schematic but as painting. There is an exception if a certain component configuration is patented, but that's rare. So essentially you can copy any electronic device provided you will not use the same layout and traces. * I am not a lawyer, just my personal research

> 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

Very few recipes are just a minimal list of ingredients and steps though? I don't think this means you have to add your life story above it, just add enough explanation about the steps and it will be copyrightable. The recipes on Based Cooking will surely pass this.

It's not like many recipe websites have 100% original recipes they're trying to stop you stealing anyway. A website of unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.

There are plenty of recipe sites out there that are mostly just ingredients/instructions like allrecipes.com, Epicurious, etc. If people are allergic to sites that try to provide more of a story or context around a given recipe, they should just avoid those sites and stick to the more "just the facts" ones. There's no shortage of those.

> Very few recipes are just a minimal list of ingredients and steps though?

If you look in a traditional cookbook, yes. The online world is different, for all the reasons discussed here.

> unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.

That's the point, though, you can't "steal" a recipe. It can be a trade secret, like the original formula for Coca-Cola, but if that recipe were to get out anyone could make the same stuff, not call it Coca-Cola, and the Coca-Cola company couldn't do anything about it. At best they could try to find out how it leaked and pursue action under theft of trade secrets law.

Holy cow. Thank you for that explanation.

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