Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

Re: IP question regarding recipes

A copyright protects expression of artistic or literary works in tangible form. Therefore, if Grandma writes up all her favorite recipes in a cookbook, she is protected from knockoff copies of her words. However, anyone can bake her bread (or try to, anyway) without infringing a copyright. A patent would come closer to preventing duplication of the bread itself, but most foodstuffs would be unpatentable because of lack of the required novelty or non-obviousness.

Now, suppose someone writes down the bread recipe from the cookbook and puts it into her card file. This is a copying, and arguably a borderline infringement, although probably defensible as "fair use" especially by someone who has paid for an original Grandma's cookbook.

If someone were to run off 25 copies of one or more of Grandma's recipes for her friends at the local bake-off, this would be a copyright infringement.

So, you can USE a copyrighted recipe, but you are limited in the extent to which you can reproduce the words used by its author.

Also, there are levels of copyright protection. Every author's work has at least some weak protection, whether formally copyrighted under Federal law and marked with the "circle-C" or not, but filing and marking provide a greater degree of protection for the author.

You are right that publicizing a recipe removes its "trade secret" quality.

Re: IP question regarding recipes

Recipes are specifically excluded from copyright protection under U.S. copyright law. (That is one reason companies like Coca-Cola jealously guard their formulas like the gold that they are.)

Re: IP question regarding recipes

I wouldn't put it past somebody to try and patent Aunt Maude's raisin bread recipe as a chemical process (whether this would be cost-effective is another question). There are lots of examples of really obvious things being granted patents such as Microsoft's recent patent for double-clicking a computer mouse. See eff.org for a list of the top 10 stupid patents. As far as copyrighting the expression of a recipe, all anybody needs to do is to add or subtract a pinch of salt, etc. to claim their recipe is original. As a practical matter, probably only the act of copying an entire website or cookbook would rise to the level of an actionable copyright infringement.