reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/19/86)
Copyright is complex. Cookbook copyright is, as it turns out, even more complex. The legal theory is the same, but the grim reality of it is different. Some relevant points: * The copyright does not cover the formula of a recipe. It covers the words used to describe the recipe. If you rewrite the words, and leave the formula alone, you are not violating anybody's copyright. * Plagiarism is absolutely rampant in the cookbook industry. Virtually every cookbook I have ever seen has recipes that were cribbed from some other source. I've been told about, but not actually seen, a cookbook that even cribbed the TITLES of recipes from Joy of Cooking, and offered recipes like ``Tomato Casserole Cockaigne''. [For those of you not familiar with the Joy of Cooking, ``Cockaigne'' was the name of the Rombauer family summer home, and they named their family favorite recipes after it.] * Copyright violation is not a crime. It is a tort. That means that if you violate copyright, the police don't come after you; the copyright owner's lawyers come after you. This matters because: * Despite plagiarism being rampant in the cookbook industry, I am not aware of a single infringement suit filed for copying a recipe. I don't spend time reading legal registers to look for suits, but I keep up in the gossip of the cookbook industry, and I think I would have heard. Recipe snatching is widely tolerated. What this all tells me is that publishers believe that cookbook sales are generated by something other than the recipes themselves, and that it does not at all hurt the sales of a cookbook for some of its recipes to appear elsewhere (properly credited). Perhaps the value of a published cookbook is in its index, or in its expert explanations of technique and ingredients, or in its wonderful illustrations, or its sheer volume. Copying an entire cookbook is certainly plagiarism. Copying one sentence probably isn't. In between is the wonderful fuzzy area. There is also a provision in the copyright law permitting small passages to be excerpted for review--a quotation from a play in a review of the play, for example. My copy of the copyright law is in a file cabinet in my guest bedroom right now, and my mother is sound asleep there, so I'm not going to go look it up, but I believe that the copyright law does not give any hard guidelines for size of an excerpt, and it is within the limits of credibility that one could publish an entire recipe from a large cookbook as part of a review of it. When a recipe is submitted to mod.recipes from a copyrighted source, I normally look it up and see how well the words match. If it seems too much of a literal copy, I send it back for revision or revise it myself. (I own nearly every cookbook imaginable, so I can usually find things; there is a nearby store with more than 8000 different cookbooks for sale and its proprietor lets me use it as a reference library.) However, even if I find that the recipe is a fairly exact copy, I often send the recipe out anyhow if there are no other recipes from that cookbook in the mod.recipes collection. I believe that including a tantalizing recipe or two from a big cookbook will under certain circumstances be a lure to get more people to buy that cookbook. The moral: don't let fear of copyright violation prevent you from sending in recipes that you like that are from copyrighted sources. Do your best to change the wording. Let me be the final judge for mod.recipes of whether or not something is a violation. Keep the airwaves full of recipes. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA
ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) (03/20/86)
> * The copyright does not cover the formula of a recipe. It covers the words > used to describe the recipe. If you rewrite the words, and leave the formula > alone, you are not violating anybody's copyright. I don't believe it. Are you saying that the copyright law has a specific treatment of recipes? Otherwise, my understanding is that a paraphrase is a copy.
ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) (03/24/86)
>I don't believe it. Are you saying that the copyright law has a >specific treatment of recipes? Otherwise, my understanding is that >a paraphrase is a copy. The way I've heard it described by lawyers is that copyright protects a representation, but not an idea. A paraphrase might or might not be a copy for copyright purposes - it depends on the circumstances. As I understand it, if one looks at the copyrighted original and cribs a paraphrase from it, that is a violation. If one reads the original, puts it away, and then at a later time writes a paraphrase, there is no violation. People have been known to lose lawsuits by keeping records of cribbing a copy. -- Ed Gould mt Xinu, 2910 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710 USA {ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed +1 415 644 0146 "A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality."
reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/27/86)
Geez, here we go again. I'm not a lawyer, but I've researched this so carefully that I will speak with the authority of one. Here is a quotation from Circular R1, "The Nuts and Bolts of Copyright", published (but not copyrighted) by the Copyright Offrice, Library of Congress, Washington DC. You can obtain a copy of this circular free of charge by writing to the Register of Copyrights, Library of Congress, Washington DC 20559. You might also ask for "Circular R2: Publications of the Copyright Office" to find out what else you can order. --------------------- begin quotation ---------------------------- WHAT CANNOT BE COPYRIGHTED Several categories of material are generally not eligible for statutory copyright protection. These include among others: * Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression. For example: choreographic works which have not been notated or recorded, or improvisational speeches or performances that have not been written or recorded. * Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents. << Read this next one carefully, folks: >> * Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration. --------------------- end quotation ---------------------------- If you merely paraphrase the words of a recipe, I guess that you would be making a derivative work. But if you read the recipe, understand it, learn the formula, and then from that formula you write down the words of a new recipe, my guess is that you would not lose an infringement suit. It is up to the courts to decide precisely what behavior constitutes infringement in this case, and the courts don't seem to care enough about this issue to have set very many precedents. What is hard for us mathematically-oriented computer science types to understand is that ultimately copyright is whatever courts and judges hold it to be, and courts and judges can be remarkably capricious and inconsistent. Perhaps we would like legal rules that are as solid as algebraic rules, but it doesn't work that way. Reality in law is determined not just by statute, but also by trends in the courtroom. Who is suing whom these days? What are judges deciding? Who is winning and who is losing? The truth of the matter is that people do not get sued for copyright infringement when they crib the formula for a recipe and rewrite it. That means that, effectively, it is not an infringement of copyright to do so. As a matter of ethical principle, it also says fairly clearly in the copyright law, Public Law 94-553 (90 Stat. 2541), that you cannot copyright a formula, procedure, process, or method. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA