[Sca-librarians] copyright on recipe

[Solveig Throndardottir]

Noble Cousin!

Greetings from Solveig!

> This is not quite true. The text of a recipe is original work
> and that can be copyrighted.
> "when a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary
> expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when  
> there is
> a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for
> copyright protection."
> http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

Please reread what you quoted. A simple list of ingredients and  
instructions for cooking a dish is not the same thing as "accompanied  
by substantial literary expression". If you want to have stuff that  
is copyrightable, you need to include things such as the historical  
development of the dish in question, your analysis, references to  
archeological, iconographic, or literary evidence, descriptions of  
the social context of the dish, &c. that sort of stuff. Basically,  
you need to build a bit of a story around the recipe itself. However,  
you can argue that an entire cookbook of non-copyrightable recipes  
could itself by its selection and assembly be copyrightable.

Your Humble Servant
Solveig Throndardottir
Amateur Scholar




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.gallowglass.org/pipermail/sca-librarians/attachments/20080910/fe8ef560/attachment.htm