Slashdot Mirror
Cook's Magazine Claims Web Is Public Domain
Isarian writes with a story, as reported on Gawker and many other places, that "Cooks Source Magazine is being raked over the coals today as word spreads about its theft of a recipe from Monica Gaudio, a recipe author who discovered her recipe has been published without her knowledge. When confronting the publisher of the offending magazine, she was told, 'But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it!' In addition to the story passing around online, Cooks Source Magazine's Facebook page is being overwhelmed with posts by users glad to explain copyright law to the wayward publisher."
What's this thing at the bottom of my page?
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc."
It's alright if the copyright infringement is committed by a media company?
More from the copyright office:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
Do you have ESP?
Please help by finding copies of their graphics, stylesheets etc. on the 'net and posting them on your own site. It *is* public domain, after all.
We aren't necessarily anti-copyright.
We are opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties for a single shared or downloaded song.
Technoli
Their Facebook page is still up though. And people are using it to collate other stolen articles. http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=196994196748&topic=23238 Also, someone found a Paula Deen recipe that was stolen, and notified Paula - who has contacted her legal department.
Um, yeah. Did you? The part about "substantial literary expression" perhaps? A list of ingredients and instructions for using them, just like rules for games or instructions for building a bird house do not generally qualify as "substantial literary expression" and generally are not completely "original works of authorship", and thus enjoy significantly decreased copyright protection.
Gather them together as a collected work, and the total work enjoys much more copyright protection, but the individual recipes, not so much.
...is getting hammered right now. Like, several comments a second. Fascinating to watch a meltdown in real time. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cooks-Source-Magazine/196994196748
I can understand that logic. It should be impossible to copyright
1 egg
2 tps oil
etc
But the actual directions on what to do with that list can be very unique in wording, description, etc and should be copyrightable.
Well, if you had read the article or followed the links, you'd see that the article in question isn't just a recipe. It's a researched article about the history of apple pie, including two medieval recipes, with commentary and a bibliography. No question that it's more than a list of ingredients with instructions.
No more than putting something in print (where technology has existed for some time allowing people to freely copy and redistribute your work) involves giving up control of it. Just because it's easy to do something doesn't mean it's moral or should be legal to do so.
What will end up happening is everyone will make a huge deal out of this. The case will go before the supreme court or find it's way into congress and the Riaa/MPAA will use it to pass even harsher copyright law under the guise of protecting the 'little guy'. Then we are all more screwed than before.
Better check those straps on the tinfoil hat. Seems like something is blocking your cerebral circulation.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Looking at whois, "cookssource.com" was registered six months ago.
Now a lot of people know who they are, so points for Slashdot giving them free advertising, as well as anybody else who clicked through to such an obvious "HEY LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY." Look for a statement of contrition and a re-launch with original content (which they probably already have on the backburner).
Suckers!
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Slashdot: "Pirate Bay Back Online"
Zealot: "Yes! Take that, MPAA and RIAA. Copyright and intellectual property don't exist. Piracy isn't theft." (+5 Insightful)
Rabble-rouser: "But the GPL is a copyright license. GPL code is intellectual property. Doesn't anybody care about artists getting ripped off?" (-1 Flamebait)
Slashdot: "GPL Code Stolen By Some Company"
Zealot: "Why doesn't the FSF sue them for millions of dollars? This is an outrage. How dare they steal code, those thieves." (+5 Insightful)
Rabble-rouser: "You realize you have two contradictory, self-serving positions, right?" (-1 Troll)
Yeah. Some people have claimed that Slashdot's response is being hypocritical, however, the key differences are:
MPAA/RIAA sues individual who downloads a song for personal use for $insane_amount per track/video. Person in question did not engage in any commercial activity related to the downloaded item.
Some magazine steals a woman's article (not just the recipe, but the whole article word for word) and commences to use it as part of a commercial product (their magazine). Original author requests a $130 donation to a college and is denied.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The title of this submission should have read "Cooks Source". Cooks is a completely different magazine.
Various people have already identified material there from the Food Network, Martha Stewart Whole Living, NPR...
Someone should run Cook's Source through TurnItIn, which has a comprehensive plagiarism search.
They just got hit on by the Los Angeles Times and Publisher's Weekly. Advertisers are reported to have canceled. One article reads "How to Kill Your Magazine".
Your effort to learn how to do something and how to convey that information and the time and expense actually to convey the information is worth nothing to you? No matter how much it's worth at retail?
That's fine.
Print this out and sign it:
I, (insert your real name here), hereby donate all prior, current, and future works created by me to the public domain in perpetuity.
Signed, ___________
Dated _____________
Then have it notarized and mail it to the US Copyright office.
Go ahead. You said copyright meant nothing, make it legal as well as practical.
as how they responded. They were rude and insulting and she just asked for a donation to a local college. To respond in the way they did anyone would be upset and, out of principal, take legal action. They could have just said, sure we'll make the $130 donation and be happy, but they had to insult her instead. The magazine should donate 10 times the amount and fire the editor.
What is even worse is the discussions that are going on the magazines Facebook page. Someone posted her actual address (taken down) to homophobic AIDS filled rants. I know it might seem odd but maybe the editor legimately thought the Internet was public domain and is now paying for her mistake. But the personal attacks is just childish
Anybody who has used Stumble Upon (or similar) knows how much people swipe from other sites to put on their own to make money from adwords and the like. I even Stumble Upon'ed a picture I took of my own cat that somebody found from my personal site and put captions on and published. It was ranked #7 in the top 100 on the site which I found rather amusing.
But don't you nerds always tell us that information wants to be free? I'm not seeing the outrage here.
That phrase does not mean what you think it means.
Bow-ties are cool.
You're right saying that the steps to reach a goal are not IP. You're wrong however in claiming that writing the article word for word which contains these steps is not IP. They are. The lines are further destroyed by the fact that the product created by those steps is an original creative work.
Lets say I wrote an article on how to change a tire. You cannot copy that article word for word. It's plagerism. I don't own the steps but I own the words. Lets say I wrote an article on how to create a special prototype tire that I came up with. Even though I outlined the steps to create it, I still own the design of that special prototype. The steps to create it in this case are not the part being copyrighted, but rather the design itself is. Using these progressive cases as examples, it's now a short leap to understanding why an original recipe is in fact IP
Plagiarism is not copyright violation. To understand the difference, think about whether you could hand in a copy of Shakespeare's Othello for an English paper at school. While the work isn't copyright-protected, that would be plagiarism.
I'm simply stating that a recipe cannot be copyright protected.
Not at all.
Most people make a clear distinction between personal use (an activity which is entirely legal in jurisdictions such as mine) and business models based on systematic use of others' work without permission or compensation.
Evidently you don't make that distinction, hence your tendency to treat the two issues as one and then claim that everyone else is being hypocritical.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
As for Disney extending copyright on Mickey Mouse, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that if they're still making money off of Mickey Mouse? I've never heard a convincing argument why Mickey Mouse should be taken away from them if he's still a viable property. The original copyright lengths were decided in an era before long-term mass media, and laws change to reflect changing circumstances.
And what's the convincing argument that copyright should be extended to a period long enough to protect Disney's assets? Why should they retain exclusive cultural domain over something Walt Disney created over 80 years ago? "Because they can make money from it" is not a sufficient reason in my opinion.
It seems to me that there has to be a reasonable limit. The protections of copyright exist to provide incentive to creators to make new work, to give them the protections they need to profit from it. But if an artwork rises in prominence to the point where it is well remembered a lifetime later - I think that's beyond what any single company should have the ability to control. That's a cultural institution.
Without some kind of hard limit, exclusivity extends perpetually, and culture itself becomes a thing subject to domination by those with the greatest back-catalog of assets. Any new work becomes subject to scrutiny: does this new song use any bits of melody that can be traced back to another artist's work? The barest traces of influence become grounds to demand tribute to the media god who, in times scarcely remembered, created something that happened to turn out to be a hit. There has to be a limit. And of course there is a limit, except for the fact that they keep changing it every time it threatens Disney's assets.
I don't want a system that so heavily favors established powers. New players should have the power to create without fear of being litigated out of existence because they were influenced by a piece of work that influenced a huge chunk of the world's population for generations.
Bow-ties are cool.
So if I write a program in Chef, can I copyright it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
To be fair, we weren't so opposed to the RIAA before they started framing people and using falsified evidence to extort large sums of money out of people.
Additionally, there is no internal inconsistency in the stances we've got. While some are calling for full abolition of IP, the more common complaint is that it's prone to abuse and the rewards are grossly out of line with the actual harm done leaving some organizations like the RIAA to use it instead of normal business tactics.
The Statute of Anne was passed in 1710, three hundred years ago, and formed the foundation of US copyright law, with some sections used verbatim. This Statute stipulated copyright terms of 14 years, renewable for a second 14 if the author was still alive. Within this broader context, it seems clear that the concept of a limited copyright term meant "limited" in terms of something within a human scale, and, importantly, bounded by the life of the original author. Instead, what we have now is a de facto unlimited copyright term, with copyrights held not by the original author, but rather by faceless and essentially immortal corporations.
Bringing up 5000 years as a "limited" copyright term, while pedantically correct, is completely irrelevant within this context of copyright on a human scale. And, within this context, Disney (among many others) has egregiously overstepped any morally or historically defensible bounds.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
U.S. Copyright Office - Recipes
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Why isn't the Cooking Industry Association of America in on this??
There is actually precedent that has determined that recipes--at least, lists of ingredients and/or instructions for preparing them--are not copyrightable. Point of interest, but jokes are not copyrightable also. (Though a specific performance of those jokes can be.)
Reference
VERY interesting talk about making money in industries that are exempt from copyright, specifically the fashion industry.
On their facebook forum, their magazine has been deconstructed to show where all of their content came from. Its not just recipes, but articles and pictures as well
For example, the image at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=439516851748&set=a.439514776748.238553.196994196748 of their magazine is a copy of http://www.weightwatchers.com.au/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum=1&art_id=38441. This is not a recipe.
Asshat: "All of Slashdot is an entire hivemind, but look at me, *I* think different (even though I consistently ignore moderations that don't prove my point)!" (+4 Insightful)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Welcome to Slashdot, where Zealot 1 may well be a different person to Zealot 2. This isn't just some Groupthink thing.
Besides, there's also quite a substantial difference between "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a multi-million dollar court case because they copied someone else's CD" and "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a $130 demand for selling copied IP for a substantial profit".
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"