Re: copyright of recipes

I'm still trying to figure out how a recipe can be subject to copyright. Pizza Hut introduced the stuffed-crust pizza some time ago. Now Little Ceasars sells stuffed crust pizza. Obviously Little Ceasars copied the idea from Pizza Hut - and this certainly must be legal - no trade secret involved and copyright can't protect the idea of a stuffed crust. So what is left of a recipe that would be protected by copyright in any meaningful way?

Recipe for stuffed crust pizza must read something like:

Make a large pizza crust. Put cheese around the outer edge. Roll the outer edge of the dough over the cheese to encase the cheese in the dough. Finish making the pizza just like you would any other. Cook. Sell.

I really would like to be corrected if my understanding is off base on this since I have advised a couple of clients that they should protect recipes by trade secret, not copyright, and that they should not sue someone who copied the ingredients and steps to make the dishes, and that they should copyright their cookbook -but that the copyright basically extends only to the compilation and to the non-recipe exposition and, in a very few cases where some poetic license was used, to one or two recipes intentionally written in dialect - and even there the only thing protected is the dialect expression - not the formula (ingredients plus process or method of combining and cooking them) itself.

Cheers,
Steven D. Jamar
Assoc. Prof. & Dir. LRW Program
Howard University School of Law
sjamar[_at_]law.howard.edu or sjamar[_at_]aol.com

"Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are busy doing it." Chinese Proverb Received on Thu Apr 25 1996 - 22:35:39 GMT