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by partiallypro 2232 days ago
Be careful with this, some recipes are subject to copyright law. I think you can list ingredients of a recipe with no problem, but once you get to exact measurements and prep it somehow switches over to falling under copyright law. There used to be a bunch of open sourced recipe repos/databases...but almost all of them are gone.
3 comments

Among other things, I am a cookbook author, so I know a fair bit about this.

Ingredient amounts are not subject to copyright protection. Any prose - intros, descriptions, instructions are covered by copyright the same way that any other book would be. So, yes, this kind of activity is likely in violation of copyright.

Let me also say that I find it a bit insulting that people who make a living creating IP (software) would be happy to disrespect the IP of these recipe authors. By taking the recipes from outside of the revenue source (a book, a banner ad, a cookie, whatever), you are stealing from the author and the publisher.

I make 25 cents on every book that is sold. So I don't actually care if you steal from me. The money is tiny. But it is a bit insulting when people - in my own living room, reading my copy of my book - decide that they want to take a picture of a recipe instead of buying a copy. It devalues the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that I sunk into the creation, cooking, and photography of the book.

So here's the moral of the story. Waiters should leave good tips because they know that waiters depend on tips. And IP creators should know better than to steal IP.

> I think you can list ingredients of a recipe with no problem, but once you get to exact measurements and prep it somehow switches over to falling under copyright law.

In the US, recipes are not protected by copyright, including precise measurements and instructions for how to combine them.

If you write sufficiently creative instructions those may be protected by copyright, but I can get around that by simply not replicating those instructions. I can give exactly the same list of ingredients and a less-creative set of instructions for the same dish without infringing your copyright.

Copyright.gov has a circular which explains this with a couple examples [1].

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

Can you provide links to those open source recipe resources?

Aren't there dumps of the bygone ones anywhere?