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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Are collections copyrightable? Knowing that recipes aren't I've wondered before why (sufficiently popular to make it worthwhile) recipe books aren't a race to the bottom with cheaper clones.

The smart move of course (employed e.g. by Delia Smith) is to publish them for free online too. I own one of hers but for convenience sometimes check a recipe I've found in it on my phone, so far they've all been there so I think it's complete.

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Cookbooks are copyrightable for a few reasons, to my understanding.

There's usually some creativity in their assemblage "The recipes of my family/time in $X country". It's generally not just slapping together 500 cookie recipes. There's photos, artwork, some kind of story being told about how/where/why.

The recipes themselves are usually more than just a list of ingredients, there's some originality in how the recipe is laid out, how to prepare it, and something else.

> The recipes themselves are usually more than just a list of ingredients, there's some originality in how the recipe is laid out, how to prepare it, and something else.

You can't copyright the "how to prepare it" part either.

You can copyright the exact text making up your "how to prepare it" as long as it's considered suitably creative. But that doesn't protect someone from rewriting your recipe in their own words (or removing all prose and chopping it down to only the necessary factual statements).

Cookbooks themselves are generally copyright-able as a compilation work. The individual recipes aren't protected but the compilation as a whole is.

> A recipe can also be protected by copyright law if it creatively describes or explains the cooking or baking process connected to the list of ingredients. Even if the description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe’s ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only protect the expression of those facts

>https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

If there's some level of creativity/originality in the preparation, then that is copyrightable.

I am pretty sure that'd be a patent. I suspect it'd be really hard to get an effective one on a coctail though. I know there's a bit more to it than adding the ingredients and mixing (or not), but there's not a _lot_ more to it than that.

I think you are confusing the raw facts of how to prepare it (generally not copyrightable), and any original creative aspects of the preparation instructions.

So, I might incorporate into the instructions about what advice my grandmother said about making it, and that might be copyrightable.

Relating it back to the original story: You can't copyright the cocktail, but you could copyright the performance of making it.

But if you just add color to the instructions and copyright that, that won't really help you own the drink itself. You'd just own that one description of how to make it. Which is fine if that's the goal, but it doesn't seem like that's what anyone would usually be most interested in.

So the actual text is copyright, like any textbook, just not the same method paraphrased?

Seems fairly obvious put like that. I suppose it becomes less intuitive when the text is just a straight forward bullet point instruction, so one's not really different from the other.

No. The actual text is not copyrighted when it consists of instructions. You can copy the exact text of the recipe, cut out the parts that don't have to do with making the food, and you're fine.

Data is typically not copyrightable. But the layout is. How you present it is.

> As a general rule, the U.S. Copyright Office does not accept vague claims of “format” and/or “layout.” The general layout or format of a book, a page, a slide presentation, a website, a webpage, a poster, a form, or the like, is not copyrightable because it is a template of expression. These terms should be avoided and, if used, will be questioned by the registration specialist.

https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...

Example given in 906.5 (separate pdf, but linked from the above):

> Fred Foster publishes a one-page newsletter titled Condo Living that provides information for residents of his condominium complex. Each issue contains the name of the newsletter, a drawing of the sun rising over the complex, two columns reserved for text, and a box underneath the columns reserved for photographs. Fred attempts to register the layout for his newsletter. The registration specialist will reject the claim in layout, but may register the illustration if it is sufficiently creative.

Debatable in part.

Law case books, reporting court cases, with particular page numbering (formatting in your terms), do not amount to a defensible copyright, so the West Publishing Companies case numbering citations do not amount to a defensible copyright claim, and those page numbering citations can be freely used by other publications.

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