I don’t get this at all. How many ways can you make a chocolate chip cookie or a lemon bar? Heck most chocolate chip cookies are based on the famous Toll House Cookie recipe with just minor tweaks. Go to allrecipes.com and compare cookie recipes. One lemon bar recipe looks pretty much like another
I can’t see humiliating and destroying someones professional reputation with this flimsy of evidence. Food Network could have simply not renewed her show without any public comments.
According to the informal rules, if you make three substantive changes to a recipe you can call it yours. Adding a handful of nuts or subbing strawberry for maple doesn’t meet that “standard.” Plus, Foof Network is getting kinda gun-shy after some of their previous “scandals.”
This seems to me to be an unnecessarily equivocating description of the law.
You can’t exercise copyright protection for recipes or lists of ingredients. But you can exercise copyright protection in creative, original expression regarding recipes, provided that the expression isn’t necessary to express the ideas embodied in the recipe.
Heh.
My WAG is that their issue was (or should have been) more of a moral/fairness sense of “plagiarism” rather than a legal sense. In other words, allegedly firing her for allegedly being an uncreative, lazy cookbook writer.
Food Network is getting worse and worse, so much so that I’ve pretty much stopped watching, but this seems like more idiocy on the face of it. As stated above, recipes/list s of ingredients are not copyrightable, nor should they be. Look up recipes for a particular style of bread, say, and you will find pretty much exactly the same list: flour, salt, water, yeast, and very likely similar, if not identical proportions. With desserts and pastries (as in this show, which I’ve never watched), there is going to be a hell of a lot of overlap with other recipes, as these types of recipes are generally more sensitive to ingredient proportions than others.
I don’t go to cookbooks or watch cooking shows expecting recipes to be original creations of the authors/chefs. I do so because I trust the author’s tastes, their research, their ability to explain the important characteristics of the dish being served, maybe a little of its history and variations, and that sort of thing. If the author is using some non-obvious ingredient in the cooking, I appreciate an attribution to where they got the idea from, but that’s about it. A
There’s an interesting phenomenon in comedy. The concept of a joke is not protected by copyright law. But, if a comedian “steals” a joke idea, then the comedy community has ways of punishing that person. I think that is perfectly valid.
It’s a similar situation in the academic community. You can be accused of “plagiarism” by “stealing” another person’s ideas. This is a completely privately enforced standard, because, of course, copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, only expression.
If the “celebrity chef community” has established a community standard that says that it is “stealing” to use a recipe from another chef’s book without making at least two major changes, then to me it is perfectly valid for the Food Network to accept that standard and enforce it, as a member of that community.
But, just as with comedy, it has nothing to do with copyright law.
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