[Sca-cooks] When is it Plagiarism and When is it a Redaction?

Holly Stockley hollyvandenberg at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 5 08:24:50 PST 2010


I guess it depends on what your parameters for plagiarism are.  In terms of - copyright violation vs. sort of wrong in spirit.
Because U.S. Copyright law pretty much only applies to a recipe if the directions are substantial and significant.  For more practical purposes - you can copyright a cookbook, but not a recipe.  (Which, I will grant you, is sort of bass-ackwards, but there it is:http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
Whether or not you feel the new "author" has impinged on the intellectual property of the original "author" is another matter.
In this case, the recipe itself is so simple as to be pretty difficult to defend.  Certainly there is no copyright violaton.
Femke

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

- Douglas Adams



> Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 10:23:09 -0500
> From: alysk at ix.netcom.com
> To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org; mk-cooks at midrealm.org
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] When is it Plagiarism and When is it a Redaction?
> 
> Greetings!  I think I know the answer, but I thought I would see what 
> you all had to say.  I have been reading someone's work where the person 
> says that the item is their "redaction" from someone else's recipe.  The 
> differences between the original and the "redaction" are (to me) 
> exceedingly minor.  What would you say?
> 
> Here is the modern version of a recipe:
> 
> 8 cups of any combination of spinach, cabbage, beet greens, onion,
>     leeks, parsley, etc., chopped
> 1 stick (1/4 lb.) of butter
> salt to taste
> 1 cup diced bread or unseasoned croutons
> 
> Cover greens with water; add butter and bring to a boil; add salt. 
> Reduce heat & cook until vegetables are tender; drain. Place bread or 
> croutons in serving bowl and cover with cooked greens.
> 
> Here is what someone has called their redaction of the recipe, above:
> 
> 8 cups of any combination of spinach, cabbage, beet greens, onions,
>     leeks, parsley, etc., chopped
> 4 Tablespoons olive oil (you can use 1 stick (1/4 lb.) unsalted butter
> Salt to taste (use sea salt)
> 
> Cover greens with water; add butter or oil and bring to a boil; add 
> salt.  Reduce heat and cook until vegetables are tender; drain. 
> (Author’s redaction)
> 
> Would the second person be said have plagiarized the first recipe?  Or 
> are the few changes enough to make the recipe "their own"?
> 
> Alys K.
> -- 
> Elise Fleming
> alysk at ix.netcom.com
> http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org
 		 	   		  


More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list