I was discussing with a friend the idea of starting a blog wherein I use a slow cooker / Crock Pot to make a meal each day: a full 365 days of crock pot recipes. My buddy suggested that I then compile them into a cookbook.
I have numerous crock pot recipes that I’ve collected over the years. Naturally, I’ve copied almost all of them from other sources: cookbooks, magazines, Sunday newspaper articles. I don’t think any of them I made up out of the blue. Some have been adapted and tweaked, but fundamentally they aren’t “my” recipes.
I assume some or most of these are copyrighted. What’s the legality of publishing a recipe, either online or in a book, that has been previously published? I really have no plans to write a cookbook, but I like the blog idea.
Copyright does cover recipes where there’s substantial artistic expression involved in the description of the recipe or technique.
As long as you take your own pictures and writes your own flowery (floury?) descriptions, the fact that someone else previously wrote down to combine 2 eggs with 1 cup of flour and 1 T sugar and mix on high for 3 minutes or whatever legally should not matter.
Of course, the next question is: if someone sends you a cease and desist letter, are you really going to fight it?
You can google “recipe copyright” and get a whole slew of opinions. What it usually boils down to is that a list of ingredients is not protected by copyright, but the instructions, steps, and illustrations might be. So in effect, if you make a recipe from a published recipe, but rewrite the steps in your own words and use your own pictures, you’re generally safe.
That said, I am not a lawyer, this isn’t binding advise, etc etc. This is just my understanding of the law as someone who tends to post a lot of recipes.
Not speaking from a legal standpoint but from a “moral” one, I’ve always said that if you change 2 or more ingredients to a significant degree, the recipe is now yours. So the ginger snap recipe I found years ago in the newspaper got changed by tripling the amounts of some of the spices and adding vanilla. Now it’s my recipe.
My mom writes culinary mysteries. She adapts recipes from previously-published sources all the time – she just rewrites them in the voice of her character and puts in a note saying where the recipe was originally published. (Usually she’s made some changes in the process of testing the recipe anyway.) Anyway, her publisher seems to think that’s all that’s required, and they publish a lot of these culinary-mystery series, so I guess they’d be up on the legalities of it.
You think The Pioneer Woman has ever published an original recipe? Think again! She has plundered the church cookbooks of Oklahoma (and there are a lot of them; probably she didn’t even confine herself to Okla.). What Pioneer Woman does is provide a story. And pictures.
I’m pretty sure about this because once, on her website, I encountered a recipe of my mother’s. I thought, how did Ree Drummond get my mother’s recipe, then I thought probably it was a pretty common recipe. Maybe my mother got it from my grandmother, who got it from a Pioneer Woman ancestor, or vice versa. And then I remembered that my mom was an avid contributor to many church cookbooks, of several denominations.
She did change it. My mother’s comment in the only published version I could find (referred to in our family as The Second Church Cookbook, we have several of them) was to always use buttermilk, only buttermilk. Pioneer Woman says “you can use buttermilk.” Not “you must.” And then she goes on about how Marlboro Man loves this recipe no matter which kind of milk you use. I believe that makes it a derivative work, but I’ll bet if I published that recipe the PW machine would come down upon me.
Thanks for the info, everyone. I like to change up recipies anyway, so I’ll likely experiment a lot and make it “my own.” Putting it on a blog of Facebook page remains to be seen.
Color me intrigued. The culinary mysteries I’m familiar with are either “wtf are / how old are these leftovers?” and “what kind of weirdo would eat THAT?” neither of which would likely make compelling plot points.
Can you point me towards some titles? (You can shamelessly promote yer ma!)
This is interesting, as I’ve also thought of trying to compile some recipes and maybe put them on-line. I had read that you can copy up to three recipes from a cookbook as part of a review, and I have shared several recipes from cookbooks in the format of reviewing the cookbook. (always a glowing review – why else am I stealing their recipes?) But in fact, I always re-write the instructions a bit to say how I do it, and what happens if you do this instead of that… So I guess I have been over-cautious.
I feel it’s helpful to document the source, even so. Not just to give credit where credit is due, but if my readers like the recipe, they might like the rest of the cookbook, as well.