Re: copyright of recipes

At 06:35 PM 4/25/96 -0400, you wrote:
>
> 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.

I think you're absolutely right.

Sheldon W. Halpern
Professor of Law
The Ohio State University College of Law shalpern[_at_]magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu Received on Mon Apr 29 1996 - 22:28:16 GMT