[Sca-librarians] copyright on recipe

[Solveig Throndardottir]

Noble Librarian!

Greetings from Solveig!

> The list of ingredients is not perhaps copyrightable, but
> if you copy the title and reproduce a list of ingredients intact  
> without
> changes,
> that falls under plagiarism (rights and permissions) and you can get
> sued for that.

Oh come now, plagiarism (passing off other's stuff as your own) may be
immoral, but the law concerns copyright.

> (Look up the Martha Stewart Barbara Tropp recipe scandal of
> the 1980's and the Richard Nelson affair. Or see 2006's article "Can a
> Recipe be stolen?"
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/ 
> AR2006010300316.html
> )

Here is a note I found about Martha Stewart plagiarizing Barbara  
Tropp's recipes. Notice that the key ingredient here is that Martha  
Stewart was passing off Barbara Tropp's recipes as being her own  
invention. Copyright was not the issue at hand.

> Several cooks and food writers noticed that Stewart had stolen  
> recipes and passed them off as her own. One of these writers was  
> Barbara Tropp. Tropp told Jerry Oppenheimer she recognized recipes  
> she herself had created and published in magazines. "It was clear  
> to me," she said, "that Martha Stewart had lifted my work without  
> attribution."
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/businesses/M-Z/Stewart-Martha.html

 From the article you cited:

> "What this reflects is a rising awareness over the last 20 years of  
> copyright issues . . . and the chilling effect of copyright  
> enforcement . . . people being intimidated out of using basic  
> common sense about things that would or should never generate a  
> lawsuit," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of "Copyrights and  
> Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens  
> Creativity."
>

Your Humble Servant
Solveig Throndardottir
Amateur Scholar




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