this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
29 points (96.8% liked)
Food Australia
334 readers
6 users here now
This is a community to share food pics, food ideas and questions. Basically anything to do with food. Every day there will be a post called Tucker Time for you to share pics or descriptions of your evening meal.
There's only 2 rules that I can think of right now
Rule 1: Don't ridicule
Rule 2: Don't be an arsehole
If you can think of anything else let me know. Cheers.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can’t copyright recipes. Period.
Don’t publish your recipes if you don’t want people to copy them.
That is incorrect.
Not really. You can copyright a book or a video of someone preparing the recipe. The presentation can be copyrighted. That’s not the same as copyrighting the recipe and it’s not what the article is about.
It's nuanced. From your source (and consistent with the copyright laws in my country, the U.S.):
The functionality of a recipe isn't copyrightable. The layout and the precise diction used, the explanations given (including editorial choices about where to put those explanations in the recipe) might be copyrighted.
So maybe the appropriate way to be safe is to do what some software companies do with their "clean room implementations," and define the ingredients and steps in a robust way, and ask someone who hasn't seen the original recipe rewrite those steps in their own words.
Of course, two can play at that game. A PR push, plus a re-listing of literally every recipe in the bestseller cookbook, using the exact same clean room technique, could get that whole cookbook published on the internet for free, with no compensation to this plagiarist or her publisher.