The copyright conundrum

June 23, 2024 by
 |  4 Comments  |  Leave Comment

Should chefs be able to copyright recipes? It’s a perennial question in the industry and the debate has raged on for decades. There are problems with other chefs making bank using a recipe developed by a colleague or mentor, but it is diabolically difficult to parse what would qualify as a dish unique enough to be afforded a copyright protection. This age-old debate has taken new life in recent years, and Josh Sims of Insidehook dives into the latest arguments.

In an era where diners often document their visits to top-end restaurants by taking photographs of the dishes, some chefs have instituted no-camera rules in their restaurants. The rationale is that it makes it too easy for someone else to copy not only the combination of ingredients, but also the artistic plating of a dish. Gilles Goujon, chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, says that photos “take away the surprise” of some of his dishes and “take a bit of my intellectual property.”

Since the US Copyright Office has decreed that a list of ingredients is not enough to qualify for copyright protection, chefs in the US face a large obstacle in their quest to protect their intellectual property. Writing a cookbook offers copyright protection, but only for the specific wording or stories in the book. Someone else could take the same ingredients, rewrite the instructions, and maybe even give it a slight twist, and there is little the original recipe developer can do about it. You can make a recipe a trade secret, and that is something that large corporations do – KFC chicken’s secret blend of “11 herbs and spices” is one example. However, even if a chef were to make a recipe a trade secret, he or she would have to spend a lot of time policing it, making it an onerous task that most people don’t have the time or inclination to manage.

Some chefs feel flattered when someone else copies their recipe; seeing it as imitation being the finest form of flattery. But most would like to at least be credited for the work they did in creating the dish in the first place. Other chefs are puzzled by the call for copyright protections, noting that historically chefs have built on the successes of their colleagues and it can be nearly impossible to list all of the sources of inspiration. Ben Wilkinson, head chef at the Michelin-starred The Pass at South Lodge in the UK, says that “As a chef, you’re constantly taking inspiration from so many different sources. Sometimes you have an idea, and you’re not sure if it’s yours or you’ve just seen it somewhere else.” 

Category: Antipasto

Post a comment

4 Comments

  • gamulholland  on  June 23, 2024

    The quote about not being sure if it’s yours: a knitting book author, Elizabeth Zimmerman, coined the term “unventing” for this phenomenon: when you come up with something that someone else has probably already figured out but that you weren’t aware of.

  • whitewoods  on  June 23, 2024

    In general I’ve always agreed that recipes should not be considered intellectual property. They’re part of our shared culture, and most recipes are built on something that someone else did before, and the same or similar recipes can easily arise independently of one another, but of course cookbooks can be copyrighted. I didn’t know that only refers to the words surrounding the recipes though. That seems crazy that someone could copy all the recipes and just write new text around them. Gilles Goujon also makes a good point regarding why you might not want restaurant patrons taking photos of the food.

  • nickrey  on  June 23, 2024

    The Internet has made checking originality very easy. If you think you’ve made a new recipe, simply run a search on the ingredients. If the recipe has been done before, it’s likely to appear in the search. In addition EYB is a fantastic place to run this sort of search. Same thing for plating variations – search images.

  • FuzzyChef  on  June 24, 2024

    The Supreme Court had good and bad reasons to rule on the non-copyrightability of recipes over a century ago. The bad reason was that most cookbooks were written by women. The good reason is that cookbooks plagiarized each other and other sources heavily, and that allowing copyrighting the recipes themselves would have destroyed the tiny American cookbook industry at the time. This is still true; in any cookbook you buy, you can count on at least half the recipes being taken from somewhere else, sometimes with changes and sometimes not. Most stories that chefs have about “inventing” a recipe don’t survive investigation; it usually turns out that they got the recipe from another chef or a staff member or a newspaper and tweaked it.

Seen anything interesting? Let us know & we'll share it!

Categories

Archives