yes, it is awfully ironic that you can copyright your photo and not the recipe. however, i’m really glad that’s the case! (and i consider myself both a photographer and a mixologist)

cheers to free recipes with credit ; )

I find it amusing (bemusing?) that a drink recipe is not copyrightable, but a photo of that drink is… generally the mixologist puts more creative effort into the composition of the drink than that of the photo

Even copyrighting a collection of recipes is marginal in the US… you have to use some kind of non-obvious way of organising it (http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm) and even then only the creative components of the collection are protected; the individual recipes are not.

In some areas outside of North America, there’s something known as database right, but that doesn’t help much here…

As much as I admire the creative spirit of our leading mixologists, I appreciate the fact that recipes are Free and Open Source by default, and we all get to benefit from them

the piece in BARTENDER MAG did say that it was “possible” to copyright a recipe, but virtually “impossible” to win the case in court. essentially, i believe that copyrighting the recipe is a waste of resources…

my own personal lawyer (who won kate spade’s case against the GAP) informed me that recipes were not copyrightable when i asked him a while back…

Looks like they haven’t been enforcing very well recently though; there are several recipes out there. Perhaps we can challenge them on failure to defend now: “the kleenex of drink recipes”