Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law.

[1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/

View on HN

I always see this as a stated reason, but I'm skeptical unless it's cargo-culting like "no copyright intended" on YouTube videos (but this is a lot more work). I can't see Adam and Joanne [1] or Holly [2] suing for copyright because when someone stole their Frito Pie recipe and left off the story at top. Especially, when they both have Google-defined tags to grab only the recipe and ingredients. As others have mentioned, the bigger sites (Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc.) tend not do the story thing.

Do you have any other info on copyright as a reason?

[1] https://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-r...

[2] https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/

[3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least now).

In the US, the facts in a phone book (names, numbers, addresses) are not copyrightable and neither is the collection. However, see the bit at the end about compilations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable. If they are, they can be used to give copyright protection to a collection even when the bulk of the collection isn't copyrightable.

Those fake facts are a thing and have a name [0], they are placed into phonebooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc. to detect copyright violations (i.e. somebody else stealing your compilation).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

And maps.

> I wonder whether "fake facts" (bogus names, numbers, addresses) are copyrightable.

This has, unfortunately, been upheld on occasion. True damages from copying such false entries would be nonexistent, naturally, but statutory damages are blind to such trivialities as justice or proportionality.

Morally speaking, anything presented as fact (including entries in a phone book or notations on a map) should be treated as fact and thus not copyrightable. Something along the lines of estoppel should prevent one from claiming that they are providing a database of facts and then suing the recipient for reproducing copyrightable "creative elements" which don't belong there. Also, selling someone a database of "facts" with deliberate fictitious entries mixed in which are not specifically labeled as such should be classified as fraud and open the publisher up to liability should anyone suffer the slightest harm due to the false entries.

I think there are two separate things here:

* database rights, which are similar to but distinct from copyright; in particular they last for only 15 years;

* copyright in a particular collection of public-domain things.

Case C-304/07 Directmedia Publishing GmbH v Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, which was about an anthology of poems, seems to have involved both things. See if you can make sense of it because I'm not sure I can!

That’s not copyright but a separate database right with different rules.

Interesting but this app doesn’t seem to be having a hard time scraping and publishing the recipe material without copyright.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com