Recipes and Plagiarism
Growing up in Michigan, New Year’s Day for me meant sitting on a sofa, eating chili, and watching college football. Over the last ten years, I’ve tried to keep the chili-eating, football-watching tradition alive in my own household. In doing so, I’ve experimented with my own chili recipe over the years, a vegetarian version, which is pretty good but, admittedly, not perfect. At least, not yet. Once I do perfect it, however, if I’m ever persuaded to publish my culinary magnum opus, how do I protect my creation from plagiarism?
Alas, under copyright law, the issue is settled: recipes are not protectable. The Copyright Office tells us that the “mere listing of ingredients or contents” is not registerable. Why? Copyright law protects original expression, not the idea underlying the expression. (Ideas can be protected under other areas of law, such as patent law or trade secret law, but not copyright.) My idea for chili, to be published, must be expressed in the form of ingredients and instructions. Those ingredients and instructions can be expressed in only a very limited number of ways without compromising my idea for the chili. And where there is but one way to express the idea for my chili (i.e., a recipe), the expression cannot be protected without protecting the idea, which would be contrary to the purpose of copyright law.
–Matt
