Cookbooks & copyright question

[clarkjc@xxxxxxx]

Thoughtful list colleagues,

I received the following query from a faculty member at my 
institution. Very interesting!... but I'm not sure what an 
appropriate answer would be--if there's one other than asking 
recipe-by-recipe permission. I'm inclined not to think so... 
but don't have an argument I'm confident of at this point.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.  Jeff

"A friend and I am thinking about writing a cookbook. 
Possible 
titles include _Cooking with Philosophers_ and _A 
Philosopher's Cookbook, or Discourse on the Method:  Being an 
attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning 
into culinary subjects_.  [...] One of 
our points is that it is quite reasonable to take a recipe 
and 'play with it,' substituting ingredients, changing 
amounts, and so forth.  Our question concerns the copyright 
status of recipes.  Could we include the basic white bread 
recipe from, for example, the Westbend Bread Machine 
Cookbook, cite the source, and use it as the basis for some 
of our possible modifications?  (It's the basis for a whole 
wheat, hazelnut, and poppy seed bread that I bake, for 
example, among other breads.)  The recipe in question is 
fewer than 400 words, it's less than 10 percent of the work 
from which it is taken, but is a recipe itself taken as a 
work?  [...] 

We'll have generic recipes, which shouldn't be a problem, 
but to do interesting things, one sometimes needs to begin 
with something a bit more determinate.  Can we use an 
occasional recipe drawn from a published source?" 



 

===========
Jeff Clark
Director
Media Resources MSC 1701
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807
clarkjc@xxxxxxx (email)
540-568-6770 (phone)
540-568-7037 (fax)