I definitely would not pay $4 million for that book.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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I was under the impression you could not "own" a recipe...
That is correct
not cool
I hope big media picks up this story
Oh, it's everywhere now. It'll be bigger tomorrow. 🍿
You can’t copyright recipes. Period.
Don’t publish your recipes if you don’t want people to copy them.
Don't claim they're original if they are not.
It's the claims about the recipes. If you premise the sale of something based on a lie you open up the possibility to face consequences. These are the consequences.
Plus the book is a shit idea meant as a zero effort cash grab. Fuck em.
oh bugger off with that. there's a difference between sharing information and having that information scraped, bundled up and peddled by a third party that had fuck all to do with it apart from cash grabbing.
You can’t copyright recipes. Period.
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.):
Copyright does not protect information about the ingredients or cooking methods.
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.
this reminds me of the margeret fulton scandal of the 80s.
she was a hugely famous cook book writer and her name sold, so her name was put on an english? author's series of books here, it was a cynical move by publishers to sell more books
these were supermarket cook books, conveniently sized and cheap books sold in supermarket
i don't know if anything came of it