[rimunroe]

> I think they do it because you can't copyright a recipe, so if copyright is important to you then you need to add other creative aspects to the recipe that can be copyrighted.

I hear this claimed a lot but I don't think it's true. I'm not a lawyer, but everything I've read indicates you can't turn a recipe itself into a literary work (and thus make it copyrightable) just by surrounding it with prose, or even by representing it in a novel fashion (as a poem). You can always extract the guts of the recipe (the sequence of steps and ingredients) and share that. I believe this is part of why food companies often carefully guard their recipes.

[tzs]

I think the idea is that extracting the actual non-copyrightable recipe from the page is harder if it is in the midst of copyrightable stuff, which might give you some legal recourse against sites that just copy the whole page.