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Food Taste 'Not Protected By Copyright,' EU Court Rules (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The taste of a food cannot be protected by copyright, the EU's highest legal authority has ruled in a case involving a Dutch cheese. The European Court of Justice said the taste of food was too "subjective and variable" for it to meet the requirements for copyright protection. The court was asked to rule in the case of a spreadable cream cheese and herb dip, Heksenkaas, produced by Levola. Levola argued another cheese, Witte Wievenkaas, infringed its copyright. The firm claimed that Heksenkaas was a work protected by copyright; it asked the Dutch courts to insist Smilde, the producers of Witte Wievenkaas, cease the production and sale of its cheese. The Court of Justice of the European Union was asked by Netherlands' court of appeal to rule on whether the taste of a food could be protected under the Copyright Directive. In order to quality for copyright, the taste of food must be capable of being classified as a "work" and has to meet two criteria: That it was an original intellectual creation; That there was an "expression" of that creation that makes it "identifiable with sufficient precision and objectivity."
The court found that "the taste of a food product cannot be identified with precision and objectivity." It said it was "identified essentially on the basis of taste sensations and experiences, which are subjective and variable," citing age, food preferences and consumption habits as examples which could influence the taster.
The court found that "the taste of a food product cannot be identified with precision and objectivity." It said it was "identified essentially on the basis of taste sensations and experiences, which are subjective and variable," citing age, food preferences and consumption habits as examples which could influence the taster.
The dumbasses should have used patents instead of copyrights. They could have easily patented the process used to make the cheese (process patent), the mechanical properties of the cheese (utility patent), and the appearance of the cheese (design patent), and sued in the Southern District of Texas for 49 Billion dollars in real and imagined damages.
So totally unlike music? Wonder what sort of precedent this interpretation may be setting.
I bet a food chemist can do a pretty good job of telling you why a food tastes the way it does. Besides the basic taste components of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami, the perceived flavor of food is primarily carried by volatile chemicals that can be isolated by chromatography. The remaining psychophysical element is texture, which can be mechanically analyzed.
Sure, there may be subtle elements that are beyond the state of science at present to characterize, but insofar as elements that can be precisely characterized and are unique, there is just as much fundamental justification for copyrighting them as there is for copyrighting story or melody elements.
The real problem is that we don't customarily copyrighted tastes. Doing so would introduce a change in the way people expect things to work we're not ready for that change.
Property is a social construct if anything is. If you were the last person on Earth, it would be meaningless to worry whether it was morally right to break into a house or circumvent the DRM on a book. When politicians created the notion of "intellectual property" around two to three centuries ago, they were intentionally engineering a change in their society. That change isn't as well integrated in our culture as personal possession or real estate, which have been part of our culture since preliterate times.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But part of the appeal of Red Bull is being seen with the can in your hand. Why do you think Red Bull spends so much money sponsoring stunt airplane races, extreme sports, and so on? It's because that gives you the image of identifying with those activities when you carry the can around.
Being seen with an off-brand knockoff just identifies you as a Grandpa who buys bulk no-name products and drives an old people car.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The recipe for a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese is:
quarter pound of beef
Cheese
mustard and ketchup ("special sauce")
onion
pickles
That's either true or false. The recipe itself, the list of ingredients and their amounts, are facts. There is no copy right on facts.
In a well-known commercial, the ingredients are sung in a certain order to a certain tune. That presentation of the recipe is an artistic expression rather than a fact. There is a copyright on that.
If a recipe book has a paragraph describing the food or the cooking process in prose, that prose description may be copyright eligible. The factual list of which ingredients are used is not protectable.
Have gnu, will travel.
Taste is a perception, an experience involving food and a brain. It's not simply built into the food. You can easily manipulate how things taste to a person just by changing the context. For example, if you tell people that the same piece of meat is or isn't humanely farmed, it tastes different.