Cook's Illustrated, copywrite, and recipes on the web
Recently I've been intrigued by a series of articles (1, 2, 3) about a blogger's tiff with a Cook's Illustrated partner about posting recipes on the web (via The Wooden Spoon, via Eat at Joe's). I have mixed feelings about this, because I think the company has a right to protect their product, but I also feel totally turned off by the way corporations often bully and intimidate individuals and often claim more rights than they actually have (as in this case). As bloggers, we have just as much at stake in our rights to fair use.
So, I think I will probably cancel my Cook's Illustrated subscription. I can make my own potato salad, and I don't need a magazine to tell me how to do it.
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I think I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. This is a sticky one. But if CI chooses to copyright a recipe, then if anyone uses the exact one- its illegal. If you reference it, you should ask, and not change it- unless you say "This began as this recipe, but I prefer it this way..."
I don't see how thats so hard. I mean, how do the cookbook people make money if all the work and money they invest in the test kitchens is recirculated without any profit?
Not to mention, that guy/girl had an obnoxious attitude. I know the CI person wasn't the best either, but seriously.
Here's how I look at it. Clearly the blogger was not trying to claim the recipe as her own, and she certainly offered suggested changes to the original, so she's not just recirculating the recipe so others don't have to pay to get it. So this isn't just a case of whether she was ripping them off. It's also a case of whether and how can she comment on the recipe in a public forum.
There are two ends of a spectrum--protected copywrites and protected fair use. You can't copy a book because that would rob the writer, but because scholarship is advanced when a person can quote a book and then critique its arguement, for the benefit of society, that is deemed protected fair use. In the same way, the arts are advanced when a DJ can sample beats, political speech is advanced when a cartoonist can lampoon trademarks, and cooking is advanced when you can cite a recipe and tell what you did to make it work in your kitchen.
One gray area, though, is the degree to which the original work is coopted. In the other cases, only part of a work is reproduced, while in the case of recipes, often the whole recipe must be reprinted. So you have to decide whose rights take precedence, the creator of the original recipe, or the person who is commenting on it, and I think the right to comment on it is much more important than the right to control access to it.
I feel pretty strongly about protecting fair use, but of course you are welcome to disagree and I won't think less of you. I can certainly see the other side of the coin too. Anyone else want to give their take? Any lawyers out there? Mark?