Copyrights and Recipes

Copyright is one ingredient that most people probably don’t think of when they think “recipes”. While I can understand that a lot of time and effort goes into writing directions clearly and engagingly, at the end of the day the passing-on of recipes is a timeless tradition, one which likely does little to prevent others from sharing or creating their own recipes.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to read that Intellectual Property issues have begun to sprout up in the restaurant business. Techdirt has a few posts on this issue, which I find, frankly, beyond ridiculous (the issue, not the posts).

Recipes are messy, vague affairs. How much salt is in a pinch of salt? What if you have small hands? How many seconds do you leave the meat cooking? One man’s spicy is another woman’s bland. It goes on and on.

Recipes are simply ideas which are expressed through cooking; it is the skill with which those meals are prepared and presented that differentiates one chef or restaurant from another. If one chef is complaining about another chef stealing recipes, I’m naturally a little suspicious of that chef’s skill in the kitchen. After all, lots of places serve hamburgers, and I don’t see them going out of business because the recipe is, gasp, public knowledge; rather, I will go to places that serve good burgers—if cooks doesn’t get this basic fact, then they have bigger things to worry about!