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Originally Posted by ApK
I have noticed that many menus have copyright notices on them. Seriously, if they think they need to protect the copyright on their menus, then I guess the law makes sense.
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They don't want a competitor to open across the street and use their menu layout & descriptions. However, I don't see the value in the Library of Congress having copies of all those menus. OTOH, the
Historical Menus Project is a crowdsourced OCR project, and it is interesting to see what prices for cheap-vs-expensive dinners used to be.
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Perhaps the alternative, if a cafe realizes there is no great IP inherent in "California burger.....$6.95" and the doodle of their logo (which should be a trademark if it's special) then they should just put "No rights reserved" or something instead of a copyright notice, and not claim any protection. Then there would be no need for them to deposit.
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There's no IP in lists of foods & prices. Those aren't copyrightable. However, the layout, font choices, and descriptions, if any, are covered by copyright. And I suspect that any restaurant or cafe that knew the requirement existed, would be happy to pay a dollar for an oversized envelope & a couple of stamps to send 2 copies of their menu to the Library of Congress. I'm just not sure what the LoC would *do* if they started actually getting two copies of every flyer, menu, info-pamphlet, and advertising brochure published in the US.