Even if she’s not, Paula Deen and everyone else with a legal department that the magazine ripped off will be. Cooks Source isn’t going to get away with “Teehee, my bad!”
Paula Deen, Food Network, Disney… I think there are going to be plenty of people pursuing it.
This is entertaining.
I didn’t want to get into the details of the law. As I said in the post, you can be sued for stealing or violating a contract involving a trade secret, but knowing or using the information in the trade secret is not illegal. So I can produce an exact replica of Coke without violating any law. If the formula was patented, it would be a violation.
I have never seen so much activity so quickly going on a facebook page.
I have to think that someone hacked into the account to post this. Because otherwise, seriously? SERIOUSLY?
I think her original email makes it pretty clear how tone-deaf she is.
Possibly. But given the tortured reasoning found in threads like this and this and this, it sounds as if the editor was thinking pretty much along the same lines as some SDMB posters, but with her own enhancements to the “stealing copyrighted material is not theft” arguments.
If you are aware of the law that’s one thing. However stating that trade scripts are not directly protected by the law is not a useful summary of the situation.
My first guess is that she’s self employed in the first place.
Here’s some more on the extent of the shenanigans. Not only were they copying descriptions verbatim, they even replicated some layout elements and accompanied the pieces with purloined images!
I don’t think it’s really the same situation. Monica Gaudino posted that article on her website free for anyone to read and use. She wasn’t charging people to look at it or forbidding them from using her recipes. What Cook Source did was copy something being offered for free and sell it for a profit.
That isn’t much like copying music that is either for sale or just legally unavailable and passing out copies for free. Two different phenomena.
And the fact that Monica Gaudino wasn’t forbidding others from using her recipes or putting out a crippled version guts one of the most persuasive justifications for illegal copying.
I agree that stealing copywritten material is theft. I’m not sure that I possess a song I didn’t buy or a movie I didn’t purchase. But there is, in my mind, an ethical difference between possessing copywritten material, redistributing copywritten material without permission of the owner, and doing the last with a profit motive.
And frankly, in my mind, the theft of the copywritten material is a lesser matter than the patronizing and bitchy tone of the response.
And Monica Gaudino isn’t a giant industry with a reputation for greedy, obnoxious behavior either. If we’d been hearing for years news stories about the ruthless Monica Gaudino Cooking Cartel forcing high restaurant prices and suing teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars for using Monica Gaudino recipes, she’d be getting a lot less sympathy I’d bet.
I didn’t see it linked upthread, so here’s one list of the stolen articles discovered so far:
spreadsheets.google.com
I suspect that entire issues had no original content.
The article in question was a research article on food that involved medieval recipes* that nobody has any copyright on.
However, the entire article, which was more than just some recipes, is most certainly under copyright.
I should point out that a lot of the work in ‘reprinting’ these medieval recipes actual can be considered copyright material because you are doing work to translate (or among the historical cooking: ‘redacting’) the recipe into modern terms. There are a lot of considerations here on every level (eggs in the Middle Ages, for example, were tiny and so more had to be used, just for starters).
Redacting these recipes is a lot of work, and you cannot just grab them and reprint them without consideration to the author.
No, you don’t understand! Having been “an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine” she knows about copyright laws!!1111!
One of my favorites is Harley-Davidson, which trademarked the distinctive sound of its motorcycle engines.
And you can bet the legal departments at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine are going through their archives right now.
The consensus I’m seeing on other sites is that that “apology” was faked.
When I looked earlier at the magazine’s site, not FB, there was contact information on it. ph#, email, and mailing address. For some reason those are all missing now.
And IIRC, there were four selections on the menu bar. I’ll have to check the cache at work tomorrow to see what’s missing.
ETA:
Paula Deen, Food Network, Disney…
Pretty sure that wasn’t the trifecta she was looking for…