Cooking Creative Expression - Recipe Copyright

These hand-me-downs call to me, yet I know not what to do with them. In a trunk in my office sit sixty-three treasured diaries from a Louisiana, Missouri woman, who was my children's paternal great-great-great grandmother.

Along with them, hand-written (often on scraps of paper) recipes in several bundled stacks, all penciled by a distant elderly cousin await translation from French, some dating back two hundred years. Then, there are the dusty antique cookbooks that line shelves of several bookcases. All of them beckon me to share their contents from time to time.

I was thinking about how recipes may very well be the common denominator of all of womanhood (not excluding the many fine male cooks and chefs). Culturally, they might be the one thing that most woman can say they "own" a lot of. However, there is a question that lingers on my mind, just who "owns a recipe?"

One study suggests that a shocking sixty percent of all recipes now being shared online are NOT original, nor are they attributed to their original sources. My guess is that this sticky state-of-cooking affairs is much greater. Getting back to all those recipes in that trunk, here is my own not-so-scientific discovery -- by the time I had published the fourth hand-me-down recipe, I was curious as to the original source.

I mean, did the woman whose hand wrote the recipe for the cake, make it up in her mind? Or, did she learn how to make the cake by watching her mother? Did she copy the recipe out of a cookbook of the time? Did a friend give her the recipe and copy it from a newspaper article (remember clipping recipes from the newspaper was very popular, and still is to some degree)? Women's magazines have been published since the 1800s, how many of these recipes can be traced to an original source like this?

Well, all of this got me to thinking about how many of us publish recipes online here on hubpages and elsewhere.

Are we guilty of copyright infringement?

Here's what I learned:

Great Aunt Margaret's smothered chicken recipe, that family oral history claims she got from her grandmother, might be a wicked recipe. From the age of the torn, dirty, and ragged paper she penned the recipe, it certainly seems to be original.

Certainly, cooking up that delicious mouthwatering dish isn't problematic -- but publishing that recipe online, or in a cookbook, entering it into a cook-off contest, or even publishing it in a newspaper -- might be constitute a wicked recipe for a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Very often a "family recipe" may not be a great cook's original recipe, but something she copied from a friend or relative, who may have copied it from a widely published cookbook of their time, and therein lies the problem of publishing recipes.

Here on the Internet, one of the things that strikes me about the prolific online publication of recipes by home cooks, is global gray area in copyright law. There are far too many recipes of unknown or known origin, that have been simply retitled along the lines of "Grama Robichaux''s Award Winning Cake."

You could be breaking the law and violating copyright infringement by sharing your recipes here on hubpages. To help make this fact stick in your mind, think of copyright law as a key recipe ingredient that is clear and liquid gold as honey, yet thick and as sticky as molasses spilled on the kitchen counter.

Here in the United States, copyright law is a matter of public record and free for all to read (under FL #122) and to make it simple, it all has to do with "creative content."

Basically, when you think about it, cooking is a science that has its own chemistry. It's all about known quantities and equations (albeit edible).

It's when you put your own spin on the "language" of the recipe that makes it your own. A list of ingredients, measurements and amounts, and the order of creating the recipe is simply not something that can be copyrighted. That's pretty much knowledge that is common to most cooks. So bluntly put, facts and ideas are never copyrightable.

Where the copyright recipe gets sticky is in the arrangement, illustrations, order, and creative ideas and descriptions that make the recipe unique that are copyrightable.

As a writer, I think it has to do with having in place a good internal value system that dictates ethical practices. It's not about what is a good legal defense should you get sued, it's about doing the right thing.

Even the International Association of Culinary Professionals, tells it's members to give proper credit when it comes to recipes. They suggest even when a recipe has been revised using the words:

• Adapted from
• Based on
• Inspired by

Church, school, and garden club cookbooks overflow the households of American cooks. When it comes to them, there isn't big money at stake in small-circulation cookbooks -- although through the years that have been legal cases between large publishing houses who discovered that entire chapters were lifted from previously published cookbooks.

Then, there are all the ever popular grocery store check-out cookbooks and the appliance cookbooks that infiltrate and invade our kitchens. The actual cookbooks are easy to protect because they almost always have a certain order, creative accompanying text, clear descriptions, and of course photographs or illustrations (in most cases). Obviously, copying pages from cookbooks would be an absolute case of copyright infringement.

Another area where publishing recipes can be a problem is when entering high-profile cook- offs or contests. Bake-off and cook-off contests routinely do diligence searches on the "originality of the recipe" when it comes to the finalists. If your recipe does not have at least a number of significant differences than other known or similar recipes, chances are you will be disqualified.

Even stating the source (giving credit to the cook or the cookbook author) offers no clear legal protection. Copying material legally requires permission, but not necessarily credit.