Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
There are certainly many novel techniques with regard to the production of foodstuffs, are you suggesting that if a chef comes up with a novel method of producing a highly nutritious food in an efficient manner that home cooks should not be allowed to copy this chef, else they infringe the chefs IP?
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It depends on whether the technique is currently under patent protection and how you found out about the recipe. If you downloaded the cookbook from a pirate site, yes, you infringed against whomever currently owns the IP, which could indeed be one of your fellow chefs.
For a concrete example that I've been meaning to try for years:
The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work
and
Recipe: No-Knead Bread
It's nice that everyone involved in the above links, from the bakers to the New York Times Company, let us in on the new technique without charging us. But we should respect their decision if they had gone another way.
Suppose that chefs couldn't make money by writing
copyrighted cookbooks. They would then have more reason to keep their recipes secret, or to patent them. So you have given me a new reason to favor mildly stronger copyright protection -- encouraging chefs to publicize their best recipes.