Recipe For Disaster?

Sharing favorite recipes is a great way for authors to reach new audiences, and ever so subtly to promote a book that perhaps mentions a particular dish.  Often, authors will get together to publish a multi-author recipe book, or blog series.

Can that get one into legal hot water?

That depends. A published recipe is generally fair game if treated as a list of facts... that is, the list of ingredients, and the sequential list of actions necessary to assemble, mix, and otherwise prepare those ingredients.

However, it would not be prudent to lift several consecutive recipes from the same publication. Just as a photographer can copyright a photograph because of the unique choices made by the photographer about light quality, angle, shadow, time of day, exposure, and other ephemeral elements, so the creator of an anthology of recipes makes unique and artistic choices about what to include and in what order.

One is asking for trouble if copying and publishing someone else's images of the ingredients or the dish. Much better to take ones own photographs (and copyright them in bulk). Try to use unique and original illustrations.

Unique and original words are always good to use in the description and specification of ingredients and in the instructions... assuming that the unique words are your own.  Perhaps avoid the appearance of a product endorsement of a trademarked kitchen implement, even if you do use a miniature hockey-stick/mashie (golf-club) hybrid to fold, lift and pummel your pastry.

Canadian law blogger Kiera Boyd  for Fasken offers some interesting "Takeaways" on whether or not recipes are protected by copyright in Canada, also insights into US case law. 

https://ip.fasken.com/tag/canadian/#page=1

 

Katharine Stevens, partner at the UK law firm Bird & Bird LLP, discusses intellectual property rights in recipes and food (in the UK), with especially interesting analysis of trade secrets and patents for unique creations.

https://www.twobirds.com/en/news/articles/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food

 

For the aptly-named Chip Law Group (pardon the pun) Pramod Chintalapoodi covers specific samples of food trade secrets, food patents, food trademarks, recipe copyrights in the USA and offers great tips for those who would write about other peoples' recipes.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=93e4b81e-69d8-4b6b-9254-d55599bc3eaa

The original is an AWS document.

Watching the movie Julie & Julia from a copyright enthusiast's perspective, it is not so hard to understand why Julia might not have been a fan of Julie.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

 

PS. Publishing early owing to past and expected power cuts.

Educating the Passions

Over the July 4th weekend, columnist David Brooks wrote about the importance of storytelling:

America Has a Great Story to Tell

Skipping past the explicitly political content, I was particularly impressed by the discussion of "propositional" (intellectual) knowledge versus "emotional and moral knowledge." Brooks quotes 18th-century philosopher David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” My first reaction, as many readers' might be, was, "Huh?" But Brooks goes on to explain:

"Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions. It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows. This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories." I would add, by the way, that poems and songs perform the same function. Think of "America the Beautiful" or "This Land Is Your Land," to name only two examples.

The importance of educating the passions (i.e., emotions) forms one of the core messages of C. S. Lewis's THE ABOLITION OF MAN (1943). He adopts from Plato the metaphor of the human personality being composed of three parts, the head (reason), the chest (spirit, in the sense of emotions), and the abdomen (basic appetites). Reason should rule the whole person, including appetites and desires; however, it does so, not directly, but through the "chest." One of the chapters in THE ABOLITION OF MAN, in fact, is titled "Men Without Chests." The "proper" attitudes alluded to by Brooks develop not through intellectual study, important as that is, but by osmosis, so to speak, permeating a child's world-view before he or she has any idea what's happening. And that happens through implicit assumptions that may never be explicitly stated. For instance, in Lewis's book he analyzes passages from a pair of English textbooks for pupils at British elementary schools (as we'd call them). Both of them convey the underlying, taken-for-granted idea that there are no such things as objective values. The authors of the texts may not have even consciously realized that's what they were doing. Lewis covers similar ground in his PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST, where he refutes the disdain of one of his contemporaries for "stock responses." The attitudes and emotions dismissed by some critics as "stock responses," Lewis maintains, are not innate and automatic. They have to be deliberately shaped through years of growth. Good preconceptions as well as bad have "got to be carefully taught" (to quote the song from SOUTH PACIFIC).

As writers, we should be heartened to recognize the vital importance of stories in that process.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Downside of Anonymity

Privacy is very important to many individuals, creators, artists... and erasing privacy is highly profitable for crooks, advertisers, copyright infringers, data miners, evil-doers.

In 2018, legal bloggers J. Alexander Lawrence and Siena Sofia Magdalena Anstis  for Morrison Foerster LLP sent a warning flare over the bows of  pirates who surfed the internet. 

https://www.sociallyawareblog.com/2018/01/09/anonymous-internet-users-beware-a-new-presumption-in-favor-of-unmasking-the-losing-anonymous-defendant/#page=1

 

Lawsuit losers may lose their anonymity. Also, copyright infringement is not protected "speech".  It's well worth re-reading.

Then, there are witnesses who wish to be anonymous: whistle-blowers, or persons who are not so proud of their private lives that they want judge, jury, and court reporters to know the details of who offended whom with an allegedly offensive comment. The jury is still out on this case.

UK lawyer Michael Halsey, blogging for the law firm VWV  discusses sympathetically the arguments for accepting anonymous testimony in British employment law.

https://www.vwv.co.uk/news-and-events/blog/employment-law-brief/fair-witness-anonymity

 

And then, there's Banksy. 

Jennifer Heath, blogging for  D Young & Co explains why Banksy's preference for anonymity cost him his standing to sue for trademark infringement.

https://www.dyoung.com/en/knowledgebank/articles/trademark-banksy-anon

 

On the same issue, senior art law associate, Becky Shaw, on the Boodle Hatfield "Art Law & More" site discusses what the Banksy trademark losses mean for street artists at large.

https://artlawandmore.com/2021/06/30/banksy-loses-trademarks-but-protects-anonymity-what-does-this-mean-for-street-artists/#page=1

The bottom line appears to be that creators of all stripes cannot sue those who infringe their copyrighted works as long as the creators are unwilling or unable to give up their anonymity. Or, to be pedantic, artists can sue, but it appears that they cannot win.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry   

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

 

Talking with Aliens

When extraterrestrials visit our planet, or vice versa, will we be able to communicate with them? This article discusses the issue of learning alien languages:

If We Ever Came Across Aliens...?

Many linguists and psychologists maintain that the human brain is hardwired with a universal grammar. All human languages we know are built from variations on a few basic structures. Would intelligent beings who evolved on other worlds share the same innate grammatical structures we've developed? If not, an unbridgeable chasm might exist between the two species. The other theoretical framework, the cognitive view of language, places more emphasis on meaning—concepts and semantics—than on sentence structure. In that case, we might expect any sapient creatures to share certain "building blocks" of meaning. The difference between these two theories brings to mind the two main SF approaches to telepathy. In one view, mental conversation works like silent talking. The people communicating telepathically have to understand a common language. So there's no possibility of immersing oneself in another's mind and learning things he or she doesn't want to reveal. In the other approach, whole concepts are transferred from one brain to the other, and the receiver "translates" the transmitted thought into terms he, she, it, or they comprehend.

The article mentions the possibility that inhabitants of other planets might communicate in sound ranges inaudible to us. However, we might find more radical differences. Suppose the aliens' language consisted of flashing lights, bands of color, carefully modulated odors, or hand (or tentacle or pseudopod) signals? They might not recognize our mouth noises as attempts at communication. In CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, an incident in the early life of orphaned Cro-Magnon child Ayla illustrates problems that might occur even between two human subspecies. The Neanderthal shaman, trying to teach Ayla the Clan's language, worries because she's so slow to catch on. Maybe she's mentally impaired? Meanwhile, Ayla wonders why he keeps waving his hands around, distracting her from hearing his words. The breakthrough occurs when she realizes hand signals constitute the core of the Clan's language, with oral speech in a secondary role.

The classic story "A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum, features a friendly alien whose language doesn't contain words with any fixed meaning. Every sentence is unique. While I can't quite visualize how that would work in practice, it's a fascinating idea. In one of the most thought-provoking episodes of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, Captain Picard deals with a species who converse in metaphorical allusions to cultural myths and legends. (As I've heard someone mention—probably Jean Lorrah—this mode of discourse can't be their only language; at the least, there must be a children's dialect for communicating with offspring too young to know the metaphors. Also, in my opinion they have to possess a straightforward denotative dialect for scientific and technical use.) In Robert Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS, the highly intelligent dragons of Venus wear electronic devices that translate their mode of communication into grammatical sentences in a Terran language. (In the case of the dragon who becomes a friend of the hero, it's English, of course.) I have faith that no matter how aliens converse, we'll figure out ways to bridge the linguistic gaps.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Afterthoughts Part 4 Assembling An Opening Scene

Afterthoughts

Part 4

Assembling An Opening Scene 

Afterthoughts haven't been indexed yet.

Part 1 

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/04/afterthoughts-part-1.html

Part 2

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/06/afterthoughts-part-2-good-and-evil.html

Part 3 

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/06/afterthoughts-part-3-grimdark-in-genre.html

One description of a novel: "Johnnie gets his fanny caught in a bear trap, and has his adventures getting it out." 

That type of plot starts with who Johnnie is, and what there is about him that needs the lessons getting his fanny out of the bear trap will teach him, (e.g. what he ever did to deserve this) -- then what he DOES (start with the action) that results in fanny getting caught.  What character trait caused him to make that specific mistake at that particular time.  

Thing is, the writer might not KNOW the answers to those questions -- and is writing the book to find out. Those are the kinds of books I like - journey of discovery, of innovation, and of character-arc.  Why is this happening to that character? 

At the end of the novel, the reader should understand the connections between apparently random events and the deepest elements of human character that attract those events out of the cosmos. The nature of that connection is the THEME, and the theme is the reason a particular reader, at a specific time in life, will enjoy reading this unique book.  

The theme is the reason you want to write the book, and the reason you want to write it is the reason the reader wants to read it. Craft that into the SHOW DON'T TELL symbolism of page one. 

Writing is a performing art - an ART.  The artist's job is to reveal hidden meaning.  

Here is an example from one of my own novels, DREAMSPY, that encapsulates a lot of information by unfolding an overheard comment - and the action the Main Character undertakes is to pretend she didn't overhear.  Here is a link to the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon.

https://amazon.com/Dreamspy-Tales-Luren-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00OWCFSIG/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Dreamspy&qid=1621634434&sr=8-2&asin=1434445704&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Scamsaurus

Disclaimer: as far as I know, "Scamsaurus" is a made-up word, and I made it up moments ago.  I googled Scamsaurus, and was offered a choice of dinosaurs, among them Samosaurus or Camosaurus. I was also offered seemingly Japanese advice on ways to discern whether or not one might be dating a married man.

One has to be careful about words these days. The USPTO is experiencing a tidal wave of trademark applications, and they cannot cope with the influx from all over the world of persons wanting to lay claim to our words and phrases.

https://www.uspto.gov/blog/director/entry/what-a-huge-surge-in?utm_campaign=subscriptioncenter&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=

Be sure to check out the comments for unofficial theories. Maybe leave a comment; there is a place to include a self-promoting url.

The copyrightalliance is another fine source for information about copyright looting. The article on the Internet Archive is a great starting point, but then scroll down to their other fine blogs.

https://copyrightalliance.org/trending-topics/internet-archive-harms-authors/

The Authors Guild recently sent out a warning about an apparent scam where the alleged scammer appears to have appropriated the Authors Guild logo for the letterhead of their deceptive correspondence by unsolicited email. Genuine literary agents probably have their own logos and trademarks. Genuine agents used to be quite open about rejecting 95% of authors' queries, and even if that may not be the case these days, agents are unlikely to query authors.

For more about the Authors Guild, start here:

https://www.authorsguild.org/category/industry-advocacy/

Talking of deception by correspondence, legal blogger Frouke Hekker for Novograf gives a comprehensive list of scams targeted at intellectual property owners.

https://www.novagraaf.com/en/insights/important-reminder-ip-right-holders-watch-out-misleading-correspondence

You have been warned!

 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

Woebot

"Virtual help agents" have been developed to perform many support tasks such as counseling refugees and aiding people to access disability benefits. Now a software app named Woebot is claimed to perform actual talk therapy:

Chatbot Therapist

Created by a team at Stanford, "Woebot uses brief daily chat conversations, mood tracking, curated videos, and word games to help people manage mental health." For $39 per month, you can have Woebot check in with you once a day. It doesn't literally talk but communicates by Facebook Messenger. The chatbot mainly asks questions and works through a "decision tree" not unlike, in principle, a choose-your-own-adventure story. It follows the precepts of cognitive therapy, guiding patients to alter their own mental attitudes. Woebot is advertised as "a treatment in its own right," an accessible alternative for people who can't get conventional therapy for whatever reason. If the AI encounters someone in a mental-health crisis, "it suggests they seek help in the real world" and lists available resources. Text-based communication with one's "therapist" may sound less effective than oral conversation, yet in fact it was found that "the texting option actually reduced interpersonal anxiety."

It's possible that, within the limits of its abilities, this program may be better than a human therapist in that one respect. Many people open up more to a robot than to another person. Human communication may be hampered by the "fear of being judged." Alison Darcy, one of the creators of Woebot, remarks, "There’s nothing like venting to an anonymous algorithm to lift that fear of judgement." One of Woebot's forerunners in this field was a computer avatar "psychologist" called Ellie, developed at the University of Southern California. In a 2014 study of Ellie, "patients" turned out to be more inclined to speak freely if they thought they were talking to a bot rather than a live psychologist. Ellie has an advantage over Woebot in that she's programmed to read body language and tone of voice to "pick up signs of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder." Data gathered in these dialogues are sent to human clinicians. More on this virtual psychologist:

Ellie

Human beings often anthropomorphize inanimate objects. One comic strip in our daily paper regularly shows the characters interacting and arguing with an Alexa-type program like another person in the room and treating the robot vacuum as if it's at least as intelligent as a dog. So why not turn in times of emotional distress to a therapeutic AI? We can imagine a patient experiencing "transference" with Woebot—becoming emotionally involved with the AI in a one-way dependency of friendship or romantic attraction—a quasi-relationship that could make an interesting SF story.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt