The Point Of Intellectual Property Is Not So You Get A Piece Of Everything
from the let's-try-this-again dept
One of the main problems that seems to crop up again and again when it comes to debates over intellectual property is that many people seem to assume that the main purpose of intellectual property is to give complete control to the originator of the IP. That’s not the case. The main purpose is to encourage the generation of intellectual property. Sometimes those things are aligned, but quite frequently, they’re not. Still, that doesn’t stop plenty of ridiculous intellectual property moves from people who seem to think they have a right to things they don’t. The latest example comes courtesy of BoingBoing and apparently discusses a chef in Europe who is asking for a special law in Italy that would allow him to copyright recipes, making sure that anyone else who made one of his recipes had to give him credit (he’s not asking for money, which is a nice change). Obviously, a written down recipe, including the instructions, can be covered by copyright. However, just the concept of the recipe should not be. The real question, though, is what is this encouraging? Obviously, there’s been no shortage of new recipes recently due to a lack of intellectual property protection for those recipes. The added incentive seems minimal — and the overall harm to society by introducing an additional “cost” (even if it’s just giving credit) seems much higher than the benefit for a few celebrity chefs. The source of this story is a bit unclear — so we hope that it’s not actually true, and perhaps it’s a bit of satire aimed at those who are still believers in things like software patents.
Comments on “The Point Of Intellectual Property Is Not So You Get A Piece Of Everything”
umm, the infringement notice was an obvious joke
The blogger missed it too.
Re: umm, the infringement notice was an obvious jo
I misread it and thought it said “chief.” I couldn’t figure out what that meant, and why he would copyright recipes.
Re: umm, the infringement notice was an obvious jo
How could anybody miss that this was a joke?
If this were slashdot, there would be about 50 people by now who would have said:
RTFA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Come on…. seriously….. “cookyright”??? Destroying their kitchen in response to the violation???? Not allowed to be inspired by any recipe?
IT’S A JOKE!!!!!!!
Re: Re: umm, the infringement notice was an obvious jo
How could anybody miss that this was a joke?
The TOP part of the post, with the fake press release is a joke. The bottom part appears to be more serious.
Come on…. seriously….. “cookyright”??? Destroying their kitchen in response to the violation???? Not allowed to be inspired by any recipe?
All of that is the joke, but it’s based on the bottom part, which appears to be more based on fact. You said RTFA. I’d suggest reading the whole F article. 🙂
IT’S A JOKE!!!!!!!
Um. Ok.
Re: What's wrong with patents?
Someone please explain to me why some of you feel there should be no patents for software.
If I create something new, and I want to sell it, it is important for me to be able to protect my idea from being copied by someone more powerful than me.
Patents are very useful for software when used within reason.
The part that needs to be fixed is the patent office handing out claimless patents to anybody with 10K.
Remember the “1 click purchase” patent?
This kind of crap is what ruins it for the rest of us, and it is up to the patent office to weed out what’s not legitimate.
Re: Re: What's wrong with patents?
Thanks, MA. Good post. We shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water – IP patents/copyrights have their place in capitalist societies but unfortunately things have gone over the top lately. Your message points this out nicely.
Re: Re: What's wrong with patents?
The problem is that people believe that ideas should be patentable as well (instead of inventions – i.e. an implementation of an idea). Who is to say that two different people can be inspired the same way, come up with ideas that are identical or almost the same? It then becomes the person with the bigger purse strings or the better luck (because the USPTO finished on their application first) who maintains a monopoly on the invention.
Another problem is how different does an implementation have to be before patent infringement doesn’t occur? One difference? Two? 10%? 20%?
These sort of issues keep smaller players, who might innovate, out of the market, for fear of being ruined by the big players with the big money.
These issues are too vague when applied to software where there are very similar memes in implementations.
Re: Re: What's wrong with patents?
Simply put, the patent office is HORRIBLE at determining what is blatantly obvious in programming, the XOR cursor “patent” is a good example of this, or browser plugins would be obvious to programmers but not to a patent clerk.
The thing is, software is ALREADY covered under copyright which grants protection for the lifetime of the creator PLUS 75 years. Give them patent protection and it will create an unfair advantage for the owner of the patent, allowing them yet another way to halt innovation.
I’d be fine with software patents if they had a limited lifespan of 1-2 years and after that the source code becomes open source. That way you have time to make your money and then to keep it beyond that you have to significantly improve it.
If software patents were allowed, you’d be paying me $$$ every time you used a “Visual” programming environment as I have prior art dating back to 1984 for the first visual IDE for assembly, BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, etc.. I know for certain that wouldn’t seem very obvious to a patent clerk back then but it seemed so obvious to me that I never released it for public use as it was simply intended as an internally used *utility*.
Re: Re: What's wrong with patents?
“Re: Someone please explain to me why some of you feel there should be no patents for software … If I create something new, and I want to sell it, it is important for me to be able to protect my idea from being copied by someone more powerful than me.”
That’s what copyright does (there’s a clue in the name). Patents, OTOH, allow trolls and their clever lawyers to extort money from inventive people like you, without having created anything new and with no intention of selling anything.
Re: umm, the infringement notice was an obvious jo
No, I think you misread the post. The *top* part is an obvious joke. But beneath he discusses what appears to be a real situation with someone asking for protection of recipes. The top part of his post is a joke based on that.
Re: Re: umm, the infringement notice was an obvious jo
You’re right, I did not RTEFA. Whose blog is this with such complicated jokes, Dennis Miller’s?
No Subject Given
Interestingly, under US law at least, there is no copyright for a written-out cooking recipe. The law considers a recipe to be a set of functional instructions, and thus exempt from copyright protection. (Of course, if there’s a good deal of creative non-instructional text in the narrative part of the recipe, one might have an argument to make, but it would be easy to slash out the creative part and leave the recipe intact.) The article that precedes the recipe, and the photo that accompanies it, are, of course, different issues.
Re: recipes CAN be protected
Functional instructions NOT under copyright protection? Can you please elaborate so that Betty Crocker, Wolfgang Puck, and that white-trash-gormet Emeril can understand this? Seriously, you need to have read the copyright literature a little better…
“Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection.”
That simply says that once you tell someone how to put them together, it can be protected. Merely listing the ingredients does not warrant protection. And as far as I can remember, “functional instructions” have been able to be protected by copyright, for examples see books on programming, home repair, etc.
Re: Re: recipes CAN be protected
Your quote from the Circular sounds to me to be exactly what I said…
And, as for the functionality/expression dichotomy that has been part of fundamental copyright law since the late 1800’s, you might want to start with Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879) (look at http://www.law.uconn.edu/homes/swilf/ip/cases/baker.htm and plenty of other places) and work your way forward from there.
Re: Re: recipes CAN be protected
“That simply says that once you tell someone how to put them together, it can be protected.”
No, it doesn’t. See the words “substantial literay expression?”
You can’t (in the U.S.) publish a word for word copy of someone else’s recipe, but you can publish a recipe for exactly the same final product produced with the exact same ingredients, using the very same method, as long as you express it in your own words.
In short, you can’t copyright methods or ideas. You can only copyright the expression thereof.
i don't mean to rain on the parade, but...
Has anyone read the RMS take on the term IP? No, I’m not a Stallman fanboy (I disagree with a lot of what he says), but he does makes some really good points on this subject:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml