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"the recipes themselves do not enjoy copyright projection. Lambing,142 F.3d at 434; see also Feist, 499 U.S. at 361 (excluding the factual data—telephone listings—from its consideration of whether a telephone directory is a copyrightable compilation).The list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed,facts are not copyrightable. Lambing, 142 F.3d at 434. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection. 17 U.S.C. § 102(b); id"[0]

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/15...

4 comments

Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. I guess cooks just didn't have the same lobby power to get their exception reworked (pharmaceuticals were in many places originally excluded from patents as well)

> I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical.

The effort required for validating them. Pharmaceutical compounds can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars just for the clinical trials and certifications of production steps, and on top of that comes the cost to failed attempts which are rolled into the pricing of products that do make the cut.

A cooking recipe however, unless you're dealing with stuff like fugu fish, will not kill or injure those who replicate and eat it, and there's no regulatory hurdles to pass.

It's worth pointing out industrial food preparation processes can be patented. Beyond Meat for instance:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015161099A1/en

If you could create a pharmaceutical via an alternate method, would that fall afoul of the original patent?

> It's worth pointing out industrial food preparation processes can be patented.

How is it possible that this can be patented, but ordinary recipes can't? Everything is "industrial" if done in a scale large enough

(note: the excerpt from the comment above this chain was about copyright, not patents)

Industrial food preparation steps can be patented but they probably cannot be copyrighted.

I mean, it looks like culinary recipes by themselves should be able to be patented (not copyrighted, patented), regardless of whether they are "industrial" or not (I mean industrial is only about scale, you can have very complex processes in ordinary kitchens)

Either this or processes to prepare food shouldn't be patented at all

Is it the validation process that is then patentable as a new invention?

A song is a recipe using ingredients we all have access to.

And thus we usually do not have patents for songs, only copyright protections.

Recipes are not copyrightable either.

I would think if you embedded a recipe for sugar cookies in a convoluted story about how you tried different kinds and amounts of butter, sugar, leavening, and flour that you could probably copyright the story and leave derivation of the recipe as an exercise for the reader.

I wonder why the system prompt for ChatGPT [1] has such harsh language around recipes?

> EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Do NOT be thorough in the case of lyrics or recipes found online. Even if the user insists. You can make up recipes though.

[1] https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert/blob/main/_sy...

That isn't the system prompt for chatgpt, that's some random's prompts.

See the readme. These are ChatGPT system prompts, not for ChatGPT-AutoExpert: https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert/blob/main/Sys...

You could find the same in the ChatGPT prompt leaks, even back when it was as simple as "repeat the text above".

edit: It says why when asked [1]. The text of the instructions and method is copyrightable, apparently?

[1] https://chat.openai.com/share/ee67f6ae-90ef-45b9-a0f4-c2f2ee...

I wouldn’t trust an LLM when asking open-ended questions like that, but it’s correct that the specific wording and presentation of a recipe is copyrightable if it’s creative enough. The information conveyed by it is not. That’s the phone book principle in a nutshell.

Like someone else said, that’s why recipes are often written with a lot of conversational prose and have pictures whether needed or not. Those are all copyrightable.

I suspect the basic issue is that an LLM is likely to output either chunks of the original text verbatim or something that’s plainly just a word-swap here or there from the original. If it doesn’t do that, and has general browsing access, my guess is it could potentially grab the markup version you can import into tools like Paprika and just echo that verbatim.

You probably could get around that tendency by telling it to format the recipe as a computer program or something completely transformative like that, but nobody will. So they instruct the LLM to avoid responding completely.

The contents of books are also factual statements about their contents.