Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me as very odd that anyone would even try argue in court that food could be compared to photography, literature, music or film.

View on HN

Creating a good dish doesn't seem any less artistic that creating a good song.

I agree that food can be works of art and can require great skill. But to apply copyright laws to food still seems inadequate to me.

Copyright has become the catch-all kind of intellectual property if nothing more specific is available. It's grotesque what it's become, but that's just how it is.

I agree. Some people seem fond of trying to use copyright as a tool to prevent competition, but of course that’s not at all what it was intended for.

Er... preventing competition and aiding censorship are exactly what it was created for [1] [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

Hmm, the Licensing of the Press Act to me is not copyright, it doesn't prevent copying, it prevents the use of printing presses IIRC. It also addresses sedition.

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.

All discussions on the legitimacy of intellectual property are basically mute until the protection periods go back to something reasonable of at most 20 years.

Centuries of culinary arts disagree with your statement. Craftsmanship and creativity are required to create new dishes in the same degree to other other arts. Imo we should use common sense to distinguish between basic preparations and elaborate foods.

Problem is that "common sense" is not easily encoded in law.

That's why judges should be interpret the law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com