If you’ve gotten your copy of our new issue, you’ve already read about Homaru Cantu, the Chicago chef/inventor/ mad-scientist at Moto who levitates food and presents his customers with edible menus. He’s one of the many pioneers in our article on “The Future.” There’s more on his exploits, particularly his attempts to patent his creations (inventions? dishes? what do you call these things, anyway?) in this fantastic article from Food and Wine on the “New Era of the Recipe Burglar:”
Consider your typical transaction as a restaurant patron. You choose something from the menu, it’s brought to your table, you eat it, and, if it was prepared adequately, you pay for it. Under those circumstances, you’ d probably say that you had bought the food. But here is a chef claiming that he still owns the food you’ re swallowing. This is something new. … Chefs have traditionally worked on an open-source model, freely borrowing and expanding on each other’s ideas and, yes, sometimes even stealing them outright. But some influential people are now talking about changing the copyright law so that chefs own their recipes the same way composers own their songs. Under this plan, anyone who wanted to borrow someone else’s recipe would have to pay a licensing fee.
We hope this doesn’t extend to home kitchens — not that we can cook well enough to violate any laws.
via our friend Ethan Zuckerman
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This is just another example of people trying to seek copyright for everything these days… a trend bound to chill creativity and the expression of new ideas, most of which are built upon previous work. It’s not as though Cantu created his recipes and processes whole cloth; they build upon years of cooking traditions and food science. May he continue to make interesting food, but fail utterly in copyrighting recipes.
posted by justin case on 11-2-2006 at 1:18 pm
Copyrighting a recipe might not provide the protection the chef desires. A copyright prevents others from, quite literally, copying the work. In the case of books, lyrics, or even artwork, the “copy” has value because it is a replication of the work. With a recipe, the value is both in the information and the outcome. A copyright on the Recipe, then, would stop anyone from putting the recipe in a cook book, or selling the recipe. But it would not protect the finished dish. Unless the cook then copyrights the finished dish as a sculpture … but it isn’t intended to be a sculpture, so there could be a question as to the chef lying on the copyright application. Then there is the whole mess created when we bring in placing goods in the “Stream of commerce.”
A patent seems like the more natural fit of a recipe, as patents protect ideas and methods … and that is what a recipe is at heart. The downside, however, would be that patents, by definition, are finite (17 years).
Whew … what a mess.
posted by Ed on 11-2-2006 at 1:57 pm