food4u
I've heard of restaurants asking for their chefs' recipes. Technically, I'm pretty sure that if you developed the recipes will you were working in their kitchen, the recipes belong to them. It's the same principle as if you wrote something when employed by them- considered work for hire. However, if you already had them, brought them in, and then started using them in the restaurant, I don't know if they can still demand that you write them down.
Now, would I turn over my recipes? That's a whole different story...
work-for-hire isn't always clear cut as you describe. It certainly seems plausible that a head chef who develops a recipe as part of their regular employment with the restaurant would constitute a work-for-hire situation. And it's definately true that any recipe created before the employee took employment is not a work-for-hire for that new restaurant. Authorship for a work cannot, by law, be decided after a work has already been created.
However, there is grey area. And, certainly, a restaurant owner who hires a chef for the explicit purposes of creating the menu and running the kitchen, would probably consider the recipes to be created under a work-for-hire situation. And, if this is the case, the chef would be required to turn over these writings, which are owned by the restaurant.
Anything created prior to the employment, would not be works for hire. On the chef's side, is that the chef often comes into employment with the ideas for the food that the chef has already prepared prior to their employment. It is this knowledge the restaurant is often hiring. The new creations in the restaurants could be derivative works of the chef's already created recipes. And while the derivative works might be considered works for hire under the hiring agreement, the original work would likely still be the chef's. In fact, the chef could argue that only the changes made to the original recipe is part of the work for hire agreement, and the changes themselves may not constitute enough original copyrightable new material to sustain a copyright on their own. Therefore, those changes would not be subject to copyright protection, which would mean that anyone could uses those changes. Although, the changes by themself are useless, since they are inherently unseparable from the original work, which, as discussed, is likely owned by the chef, not the restaurant. So, one can clearly see the grey area that ensues when talking about work-for-hire.
And, it's also important to remember that recipes in general have a limited protection. The list of ingredients, no matter how long or extensive, are not subject to copyright protection. If the process is written down, only the original authorship needed to describe the process is protected, but the process itself is not protected. In other words, The written description of the process of making the meal is protected, but that protection does not extend to the meal itself. Anyone can follow that recipe and make the meal, and sell it, and they don't need permission from the copyright holder of the written recipe to prepare the meal, and sell or otherwise distribute the meal. Buying a copy of a recipe, however, does not allow you to reprint the recipe, except in certain limited case as outlined in 17 USC 107-122, but they can make the meals and sell them to anyone.
Truth is, the craft, or expertise, needed to successfully prepare a dish, is rarely found in the recipe itself, rather the true genius is in the skills of the chef that translates the recipe into the actual meal that is consumed.
Many Chefs offer their real recipes to cookbooks, tv shows and other outlets, because they know their skills cannot be duplicated merely by reading the recipe.
<message edited by Scorereader on Wed, 05/6/09 1:38 PM>
