SC - Recipes vs. Copyrights

[david friedman]

At 2:51 AM -0500 2/19/98, Korrin S DaArdain wrote:
>M'lord Ras & Cariadoc,
>	You are welcome for the information.
>
>	Does anyone on this list have ANY objections to me starting my
>own collection of recipes that have been posted to this list or the WWW?

I have no objection to your including my recipes in such a collection, as
long as they are credited and not changed--I have a permission along those
lines at the beginning of the _Miscellany_. I suspect most people on this
list would feel similarly.

But if you are collecting random things off the web without getting
permission from their authors, you may be in violation of copyright. There
are, for example, a bunch of recipes on the web from published secondary
sources--almost certainly posted without copyright permission. Making
copies for your own use is probably within the fair use exception to the
copyright act. Reproducing lots of them and selling them is getting
iffy--even if you only cover cost.

For what it is worth, there are two things that I pulled from Volume II of
my cookbook collection (one Portuguese, one Andalusian) when I realized
that a translation of a translation (which is what they were--the
translation into English being done by people in the SCA who were happy to
have me publish it) was a derivative work, hence covered by the original
translator's (Medieval Portuguese to modern Portuguese in one case, Arabic
to Spanish in the other) copyright. For a third and more important item
(_Manuscrito Anonimo_) I solved the problem by getting someone to do a
translation for me from the original Arabic, instead of a retranslation
from the Spanish. And all my books are priced so the wholesale price
roughly covers reproduction cost.

If your question is whether I would do anything about it, the answer is no.
But you should be aware that you may be in violation of copyright law, and
if the holders of the original copyright sue--more likely for commercially
published works than SCA works, and not very likely for anything--you might
lose. So my advice would be to limit your published collection to things
for which you can get the author's permission.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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