Cooking Property?

What happens when one famous chef copies another's recipe?

The place is agog at the effrontery of Vigneron, since they believe he has brazenly ripped off one of chef Wylie Dufresne’s best-known dishes. By the looks of a feature in the current issue of Wired, Vigneron has created a showpiece dish of a “cyber egg,” the yolk of which is made of carrot-cardamom purée, surrounded by a white of hardened coconut milk. Very interesting, given that almost the exact same dish (minus a garnish of foam and carrot) has been served often at wd-50, is featured on the restaurant’s website, and, we are told by members of the staff, has been eaten by Vigneron at least twice. “It’s one thing to be inspired by a dish and to change the flavors to make it your own,” says line cook John Bignelli. “But to just steal everything? How can you do that?” Dufresne, staying above the fray, declined to comment.

— Did Marcel From ‘Top Chef’ Really Just Rip Off Wylie Dufresne? Grub Street, New York Magazine, 15 May 2007

You get a lot of commentary.

After quoting another chef about how everybody copies from everybody else:

I think he brings up an interesting issue -- refinement versus invention. Of course, though, the brouhaha he refers to treads close to invention. Ferràn Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, and Wylie Dufresne come very close to inventing with food. On the other hand, what they're doing is so creative that they don't need lots of protection, and don't seek it. If you make foam, we know who you're stealing from. Ditto for putting a laser on a vanilla bean or a cyber-egg. And if one doesn't want people to steal one's recipes, one doesn't publish a cookbook, after all.

— Marco Pierre White on Intellectual Property, mordaxus, Emergent Chaos, 22 May 2007

Well, maybe. But couldn't you make the same argument about publishing a novel? Novelists also copy ideas from everyone else, but when they copy exactly, word for word, without acknowledgment, it's called plagiarism.

Is intellectual property not really property if it's a recipe? And if so, why exactly do we have software intellectual property, whether trade secret, copyrighted, or patented, an algorithm being nothing but a recipe, after all?

-jsq

Comments

[orcmid]

You've answered your own question. Copyright does not extend to the ideas and methods expressed, but only to the expression.

So the expression of the recipe in a cook book might be subject to copyright, but the use of the recipe -- carrying it out -- is not. Ditto for software. There are other protections that are used to cover the gap for software.

So plagiarism is not about ideas but about words (the Tom Lehrer song notwithstanding).

Of course, "ripping off" the idea of another is a different matter, but not exactly a legal concept.

[Ben Hyde]

"Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs"

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881781

[jsqrisk]

Indeed, copyright applies only to a particular expression; that's why I also mentioned patents. Software patents are about algorithms, which are recipes.

Meanwhile, "ripping off" in the sense of plagiarism is enough of a legal concept that people win lawsuits about it frequently. But I agree there are aspects of such idea theft that go beyond the law.

Hm, norms-based; thanks for the tasty buzzword, Ben.

-jsq

[Raven_maven]

Wylie Dufresne should be thanking Marcel for all the free publicity. He has not been in the press in ages. The last time I ate at WD-50 it was half empty, and I once read that his restaurant barely turns a profit. People think he is so avant-garde, but he's probably the LEAST innovative of America's molecular gastronomy chefs (no match for the likes of Grant Achatz, Homaro Cantu, & Jose Andreas). Plus compared to other NYC chefs serving modern cuisine at similar price points, he's probably the only one that a) has only one restaurant, and b) has never written a cookbook. I hate to say it, but people are not clamoring for his food.