[Sca-librarians] copyright on recipe

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 03:08:46PM -0400, Johnna Holloway wrote:

> 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.

It's really hard to follow your argument when you continually mix up
copying an ingredient list with copying the lyrical description of how
to make the dish -- the first isn't protected, the second might be, if
it's creative. And how can something be plagarism if you mention the
source?

But this is irrelevant to this case: it's the transcription of the
original old recipe which was the original question.

Now for that one, a transcription creates a new copyright only if it
is creative. If it's an easy-to-read original and the transcriber
hasn't changed it, it probably doesn't create a new copyright. But the
only way to know that is to have looked at the original. And if you
have the original, you might as well transcribe it yourself.

Now, there's also a question of fair use. It sounds like this single
transcription could easily fall under fair use.

> In any case the last thing the SCA wants is to be accused of plagiarism 
> or copyright violations which
> is why publications are going to be urged to tighten up as regards recipes.

It's a real shame there's so little understanding of this issue, and
it's getting worse over time. It's not hard to change a recipe to fall
within the "facts can't be copyrighted" clause, but I don't see anyone
official saying anything but "Tighten up! Don't copy recipes!"

-- Gregory