Food taste 'not protected by copyright' rules EU court
bbc.com
bbc.com
> [Sybaris around 700 BC] pioneered the concept of intellectual property to ensure that cooks could exclusively profit from their signature dishes for a whole year. [1]
I've seen this in a lot of blogs and recipe books, but I don't know how far it extends, and I'm sure someone could extract just the base recipe from the narrative and the derivative work wouldn't violate copyright.
Once you have published a cooking recipe you cannot prevent anyone from recreating the dish by following that recipe, even restaurants.
That's made to ensure that ideas are free to flow. That's very good for auhtors (and society in general, as far as I'm concerned)
> Copyright does not protect information about the ingredients or cooking methods.
> It is not an infringement of copyright to watch someone prepare a dish and write down the ingredients and method in your own words.
What's copyrighted, is the word-for-word original reference. If you reword it, then that's free to disseminate.
It isn't what people think of as a recipe - the ingredients and methods involved. It's just that particular copy of the ingredients and methods involved.
[0] https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod/ACC/Information_Sheets...
Patenting an innovative recipe is perfectly allowed though, including design patents of the innovative look of the item.
This kind of cheese is not considered innovative enough though.
If it's distinguishable enough, you can also trademark the thing.
Again, only kinda. Techniques, styles, methods, ingredients, timings, quantities are all not covered by your copyright.
A bare-bones recipe would likely not be covered by copyright, as it has nothing in it that is copyrightable. Only when you expound on reasoning of methods, or cautions do you start to get things that can be copyrighted.
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> Patenting an innovative recipe is perfectly allowed though, including design patents of the innovative look of the item.
I'm not sure what has given you that idea. Generally speaking, in Australia, a process that creates an edible item, is not patentable. These are set out as non-patentable:
> Capable of being used as a food or medicine and is a simple mixture of known ingredients (section 50(1)(b)(i))
> Is produced by mere admixture (section 50(1)(b)(ii))
Unless the process itself is inventive, and involves techniques out-of-reach of the average person, it probably is not patentable.
However, you can trademark items that are not fit for the patent office, that has a lesser set of requirements.
If you're more concerned with the unenforceability than the consequences of enforcing a law then something has gone wrong. Going back to your example, a law against hunting sentient creatures would make sense regardless of the fact that establishing sentience is a hard philosophical problem.
When home VCRs became commonplace, creating an automatic copy of a broadcast was still illegal. Some German high court ruled that people's right to privacy in their own homes trumped law enforcement's interest in enforcing copyright, so the law was unenforceable in those cases. Hence was born the exemption for "copies for private use", and the related "tax" applied to sales of VCRs (and later on, blank CDs and DVDs) that was used to pay off author associations.
Edit: Trademark, not copyright, damn it!
Maybe the smell is a trademark only for other goods (I don't know what Class Playdoh falls in, toys?), eg Playdoh scented merch?
On searching I found an informed, brief treatment here https://loweringthebar.net/2018/05/play-doh-smell-trademarke....
While you can get some sort of single-molecule chemical representation of some specific smell or taste, that would be static (as in, the formula or construction wouldn't change) but most people would smell different things.
I suppose for those 'inventions' the recipe or method would be trademarked/copyrighted/patented but not the result.
[0] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
The Statute of Anne includes the deal of provision of copies on deposit to named libraries, and of entry to the public domain; education and availability of publications are specific aims.
It provides a reward period of up to 14 years (the cost of printing being considerable), and then entry to the public domain making for easy and open competition.
It would be like saying today that a monopoly period of 14 months on a book was inhibiting competition - such a period allows recovery of costs, and so aids the dissemination of literary and artistic works by make it cost-effective. Yes, it inhibits competition, but key to the other aims is that this inhibition is limited in order to provide a genuine, timely benefit to the public.
I don’t know how red looks to you, but every time you see red, you know it’s red. Even if red looks to you like green looks to me, when we both approach a red stop light we will both stop. We can be sure of that. Even though we may perceive the same red stop light differently, we can still interpret it to mean “stop”.
Same for taste. You know when you’re eating a Big Mac and when you’re not. Even if it tastes different to you than it does for me. And more importantly, a Big Mac tastes like a Bic Mac to you every time. The results are repeatable, so long as you’re the constant.
So yep perception is inconsistent between people, but within an individual you do have consistency. The individual is the reference point.
Anyways hope people don’t take this as some sort of endorsement for trademarking taste. It’s more of an observation about the nature of perception.
You're assuming we all agree on what stop lights, rules of the road, cars, etc. are. If you see a red stop light from your perspective, I may see what from my perspective is a yellow ball - if you were to replace some part of your 'world-interpreter' with part of mine you might see a green frog. Also, just because we appear to act in certain patterns doesn't mean we can make sense of them. Can an electron make sense of itself?
> Even though we may perceive the same red stop light differently, we can still interpret it to mean “stop”.
Not really since you're just witnessing what I'm doing from your perspective - stopping. But maybe from my perspective I'm eating an apple sometimes and sometimes I'm drinking a coffee, but you interpret both of those as me stopping at a stop light. Maybe it's that specific time which makes you think I'm stopping at a stop light?
The fact that we can build computers, and run code on them for decades without anything particularly strange occurring, provides evidence that our corner of the universe is reasonably stable.
To what extent? Do we have a way of measuring our understanding of the world?
We do. It’s called traffic school.
Even if we all perceive things differently, we can still manage to sit in the same classroom and learn to interpret them similarly.
Sure, you could list a finite number of things humans perceive in a similar way, based on your own perception, but what about the possibly infinite number of things that humans don't perceive the same way or agree on?
My entire thesis is that people may perceive things differently. Go re-read everything I wrote and tell me where I said people perceive similarly.
There exists a difference between perception and interpretation. Perceptions are peculiar to the individual. Interpretations can be agreed upon between individuals. There may be things in this world that we can’t even perceive, but our interpretations are based upon observations that are consistently repeatable.
Nothing is truly repeatable because we don't have the ability to perform truly controlled experiments - we can't control time for example.
You can’t just go around changing words all willy nilly. Language is a group effort and different words have different meanings.
> Interpretation can be thought of as part of perception or vice versa depending how you look at it.
Nope. Interpretations are based on perceptions. We’re talking about perception in the physical sense. Like seeing, smelling, etc. I can’t teach you how to perceive any more than I can make a blind man see. But when you perceive what I perceive to be a red light, we can both interpret it to mean “stop”. In this country, if you want a drivers’ license you better adopt that interpretation.
> Nothing is truly repeatable because we don't have the ability to perform truly controlled experiments
The scientific method has been used very reliably and predictably to solve very big problems. It’s all based upon repeatable observations. And you’re right, we’re never 100% certain about everything, that’s why the body of work continues to improve over time.
> If you define interpretation as some stage of perception/observation that humans agree on
I said that interpretations can be agreed upon by individuals. You can also have your own interpretations that nobody else agrees with. I’m pretty sure Tarzan has his own interpretations of his perceptions. But in society we have decided to arrive at similar interpretations to many things so that we can function. You know? to prevent people with drivers licenses from obliviously running red lights and crashing into you and breaking every bone in your body, etc.
If you're going to argue semantics, then at least start with some definitions for the words you're arguing about. Your definition of perception as just the sensory input and interpretation as a conclusion based on this perception is not the only way or even the common way to use the words in this context.
For example:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...
> Perception refers to the set of processes we use to make sense of the different stimuli we’re presented with. Our perceptions are based on how we interpret different sensations.
and
> Perception: The organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information
> The scientific method has been used very reliably and predictably to solve very big problems.
When you say 'very reliably and predictably' what does that actually mean? What does 'very' mean? Do we have a way of objectively measuring these things?
> But in society we have decided to arrive at similar interpretations to many things so that we can function.
'Decided to arrive at' and 'arrived at' are not the same thing and also depend on your 'interpretation' of society. An electron doesn't decide to behave similarly to other electrons even if it does so, for example.
A Pantone colour will list the required method to create an item with that colour. That is, the mixes required to create it for printing on paper, or for dying clothes, etc.
It's more detailed than just a number.
But of course to work to do all this would be fantastically expensive in practice, which is a whole other major problem,
If you just took a list of all the chemical compounds in say the cells of a herb plant leaf and synthesized them in a chemical slurry I doubt it would taste much like the herb. Which chemicals in the leaf fragments actually evaporate causing the smell? Which ones diffuse into the cheese, and how does the structure mediate that?
The EU does stupid things from time to time, but generally I think the EU gets things reasonably right..
Getting rid of roaming charges was huge! Not adding software parents was huge! GDRP has pros/cons, mostly it's a problem that people think they comply by making consent popups.
But yes, aspect of current copyright reform and cookie law is stupid. But only aspects -- who knows maybe we can fix them :)