I’m not cutting and pasting the actual recipe because, as we all know, that would be a copyright violation BUT I will direct you to the recipe that I use when I make the Garbanzo Salad with Pomegranate Seeds.
I make it with and without the cilantro, usually skip toasting the ground cumin, don’t peel the cucumber, and frequently double the amount of pomegranate seeds because I love them so. Other than that I make it exactly as is.
This is one of the single best things to do with a pomegranate and is a staple at my Christmas dinner party.
If you cooked using that recipe, is that considered derivative work?
Bzzt! Thank you for playing! Recipes themselves are not copyrightable, as they are mere lists of ingredients and directions for producing useful articles. See Copyright Office Form Letter 122 (which probably overstates things at the extreme, but that’s slicing the bologna awfully finely before carefully julienning it for Fried Bologna Salad).
The CooksSource problem arose not from the recipes themselves, but from the combination of selection, arrangement, and expression embedded in the particular statements of the recipes. CooksSource would have been within its copyright rights to merely reedit a single recipe for house style. What it did went well beyond that, into the original author’s original expression… and that’s the copyright violation.
If you’re not confused yet, you should be. Just as a hint, one of the reasons that cookbooks tend to have those lavish illustrations is to ensure that the selection/arrangement/presentation aspect is strong enough to prevent someone from just running a copy off on the neighborhood photocopier to without any potential liability… and it’s also why cookbooks tend to have chatty, personal-perspective introductions with each recipe that are protected by copyright.
I was making a joke.
We in the legal profession, just as agents at the FBI (according to Men in Black), do not have a sense of humor of which we are aware.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been inundated with that same damned question for the last week, and get it cyclically (around the end of October every year).