Recipes are actually generally not patentable or copyrightable, which is why recipes have the flowery spiel and giant photos in any cookbook or recipe blog.
"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]
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.
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
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 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.
