Really?

This ho-hum non-headline on CNet heralds an article worth a glance, nevertheless. Am I just grumpy this morning, or is this nonsense getting out of hand?

“Pirates in the Kitchen”

First of all, how many times do people have to be told that recipes are not protected by copyright? Unless they have original literary characteristics that go beyond a list of ingredients, a formula and process instructions. And even then only those parts that are original literary expression are protected. There. I hope I never have to write that again.

And then there’s that neon word “pirate.” Also starting to get on my nerves. I mean, talk about lack of originality. A very sharp legal mind at a conference I attended last year pointed out that the term is badly employed when referring to end users.
“Piracy” means chase and entrapment, embarking upon someone’s vessel by force, stealing their goods (not copying them) and making off with them, not to mention the odd bit of killing and raping here and there. Kids who download songs just don’t fit this definition. The real pirates, as this gentleman (I promise to remember his name by the end of this post) pointed out, are the companies and corporations who follow us and entrap us, embark upon our computers and tell us what we can do and how to do it (proprietary software), and make off with our private data. That’s piracy.

Andrew Bridges. Thanks and proper attribution.

The article on CNet does give an excellent description of the commons and of derivative works, however. “Sharing recipes has been part of the culture of cooking for decades, if not centuries. Even the very nature of recipes is based on taking others’ ideas and making slight changes to them to suit individual tastes.” Art is no different, nor is literature.

And there is one intriguing idea lurking here. This “content tracking company Attributor” — and I’m sure there are others — could this be used to track the reappearance of museum content online? Not in order to chase down individual image copiers — I’m not into piracy these days, even though I am learning to sail. I mean tracking where our content ends up in order to understand who’s interested and why. Is anyone out there doing this already?

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