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From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.cooks,net.legal
Subject: Copyright and cookbooks
Message-ID: <5475@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 19-Mar-86 02:30:17 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.5475
Posted: Wed Mar 19 02:30:17 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Mar-86 04:57:51 EST
References: <354@hropus.UUCP> <526@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 64
Xref: watmath net.cooks:6270 net.legal:3135

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