Recently a girl started a blog on Facebook where she's making all the recipes from the Hummingbird Bakery's Cake Days book. Initially she was putting the full recipe until Hummingbird asked her to stop, saying the recipe was copyright. There was a lot of basklash at the time because people asked how can you copyright the recipe, particularly when it's a standard sponge recipe? And if you deviate from the recipe, even slightly, does it stop being copyright? What if you make up a recipe and it just so happens to be one that's in some obscure baking book somewhere, can you be sued?

Another person mentioned it's only copyright theft if you scan the page and post it?

Now, I'm sort of in two minds about this. I write a baking blog and will be testing 'healthy' baking recipes to see if you can truly get good tasting baking without millions of calories. The blog would certainly be better if I could include recipes (I'd always credit the source unless the recipes were my own) but I'm concerned for both the moral and legal aspects of doing this.

Does anyone know if there are any hard and fast rules about this? I understand it must be frustrating to spend a long time making a book of delicious recipes then have them reproduced for free online. And certainly I wouldn't do that. It would very much be 'this is what worked and here's the recipe'. Can I list their ingredients then write my own instructions?

I'm certainly not expecting millions of people to read my blog, but would be keen to find out what the stand is on this.

Any advice appreciated.

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html




Also, if you deviate even the slightest it is no longer their recipe. Adding, say, a pinch of salt will change it enough, or deviating from te directions will change it enough to no longer be considered their recipe.

Yes you can copyright a recipe

Sorry to be a pest, but can you point me to somewhere that discusses the justification behind this?

I edited my post because Wyatt put it more simply than I did and I misunderstood the OP anyway. Fortunately, Wyatt's information is correct and he did link to the justification.

It's an arrangement of data. It's not so much the thing itself that is copyrightable, it's the effort and money spent on putting the recipe together that might make it an infringement to copy it. It could be argued that if it was a common recipe that little effort was exerted on it, but if she copied it word for word, it's likely that some effort was put into the arrangement of it. You can copyright football table fixtures, after all.

I can't remember the exact authorities for that, but that was the gist of it when I studied it in December. I could be wrong, though.

This mostly only applies to UK law.


Note that a recipe would be serperate from a process, which would be the physical production method used to make the food (eg vienetta, coca cola). A recipe would be closer to book copyright than that. You wouldn't be infringing copyright to make the cake, but you would be if you tried to republish the recipe.

you can copyright recipes in book form...published form, I should say, If you present your recipes in a way that demonstrates artistic uniqueness, such as using stories, illustrations, prose, etc. Note that you are copyrighting the presentation of the recipes. The Copyright Office will not copyright base recipes unless they are more than a listing of ingredients. note that extensive descriptions of the process of using the recipe could be copyrighted.

I misread the title and though you meant the paper slip you get when you buy stuff

On topic: I can see how special recipes (Like Coca Cola and the like) could be copyrighted but not average things like sponge cake and stuff like that.

That would technically be a patent (or if they couldn't get that, they'd push for a trademark on the presentation of the flavour). As Kjarista says, copyright would be about the arrangement of the intructions, not about how novel the cake itself is.

Something like the Coca Cola recipe is actually a trade secret. The resulting product might be able to be covered by something like a composition of matter patent (similar to what covers pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical formulations), but the non-obviousness of such a patent could probably be challenged in court if anyone were so inclined. Additionally, patents must be published with enough details that anyone reasonably skilled in the art can reconstruct whatever is being claimed in the patent, and unlike copyrights (which are now nearly perpetual) patents still expire 20 years from the filing date. Thus why things like to Coca Cola recipe are kept as trade secrets rather than patented- so others can't easily reproduce them and so it doesn't then become open season for generic brands once the patent expires.

Thanks guys. I think really the safest thing is to put what's in the recipe but no measurements. Thanks for the link Wyatt.

To address something implicit in the phrasing a lot of people have used here: you do not have to 'copyright' anything; if it is protected by copyright laws, it is protected from the moment it is created. In some countries, one can register copyright to make it easier to defend it should someone infringe on it, but you do not need it or anything else to be covered.

No rights reserved on this text.

I'm not exactly pro-copyright laws, but even I still think it's in bad taste to post other people's works without giving them credit. When posting something not your own, you should give attribution.

Absolutely DEFRON which is why I said in my OP I'd always credit the source

I just add a mililiter more water than they do. No more copyright.



BAM!

If they really wanted to get you, they could probably still get you if you did that. It being a minor change that is an obvious attempt to get away with breaching copyright, an' all that.



I dunno much about the relevant laws and stuff (especially since they vary a bit throughout the world), but Emz might be allowed to copy one or two recipes per book, since that would be only a fraction of the work and there are a few exceptions out there (and there's what you can get away with simply because its so minor that the rights holder can't be bothered with it). The person mentioned in the OP was copying every recipe from the book, which is a big and obvious no-no.

Ideally, consult a qualified professional. Short of that, read up on copyright laws in your region.

Not on all things, in the UK some things are not covered by sui generis copyright, and have to be properly registered. Those are usually database-like stuff though.

Yes, it would depend on whether the portion of the work taken represented a significant part of the effort exerted on the whole. And on whether the copyright holder was willing to bring legal action against a peniless blogger.

I did have the qualifier "if it is protected" :hehe:.

Ah okay. Easy to beat though.

"COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!"
"No it's not. You ad the eggs first, my instructions explicitly states to add the eggs third for a more fluffy cake "

Generally, copyright violation is to copy another person's work and present it as your own. If you make minor changes to another's work, it will not get you off automatically.

The key to not being in violation of another person's copyright or patent is to prove independent development.

Example, Devil's Food Cake by XYZ Bakery. Award winning cake you want to make your own. You get the recipe and make minor changes in how it says to go about making it will not break the copyright. You are still, in essence, copying the work of another.

Now, take that cake, taste it, then use your expertise to make one that tastes just like it. If your end-product winds up being a line-for-line copy of XYZ's recipe, you've broken the copyright. You independently created the same product without knowledge of exactly how XYZ made their own.

This is done for copyrights and patents all the time. When someone makes a product and a competitor wants to make the same thing, they basically give the specifications of how the product works (what it does) to someone with no connection or experience with the product to be copied. That person(s) "invents" something that does what the original product does. If it winds up being a near-perfect copy, there is no copyright/patent infringement because the developer independently came up with the same product.

In fact, patent law often winds up being of dubious value. By recording a patent, you are telling everyone how you did it and those wanting to copy it can look at your design and gain a deeper appreciation for how your product works...giving them insight so that they and better inform their own developers what specifications do design a competing product to. This is why many products are always "reinventing" themselves every few years. If they don't change the product, competitors produce fairly equal products and their uniqueness in the market disappears. Some companies find it a better use of funding to put dollars into R&D for the next-gen product than into litigation to obtain and enforce a patent.