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Recipe Archives->About the copyright

There has been a bit of confusion about the wording of the copyright notice on the site, so I thought I'd take a minute and clarify. I am not an expert on the topic, but I have researched it some. Keep in mind copyright with respect to the Internet is a fairly new concept and mostly untested in the legal sense. With that aside, here are my words on the matter.

Copyright applies to creative, original works. There are many things that are not copyrightable, one of which is a technique. Hence you can't copyright a recipe.

However, you can copyright the specific words used to describe a recipe. You can copyright a unique collection of recipes such as a cookbook.

You can copyright the design and original content of a web page.

Our copyright notice is worded strongly because on more than one occasion there has been unauthorized use of the database. One justification was that at the time, no copyright notice was displayed. (This argument does not hold as the Berne Convention states copyright doesn't have to be explicitly declared and that copyright is automatically granted to the author of any original work.) This particular misuse occured when over half the database was accidentally deleted (including the copyright notice) and the notice was overlooked when the database was restored.

It has been mentioned to me that since I take the recipes from a public source (Usenet) that they are in the public domain. If I were keeping a straight FTP archive or an unaltered news archive such as the one on Deja News, that might be true. However, I edit all the recipes, file and organize them, and have spent thousands of hours in the process of doing so, turning the archive into an ongoing creative process.

There is heated debate over whether or not Usenet is in the public domain or if any article is treated as a correspondence/publication and therefore copyrighted by the author, and consequently what another entity may or may not do with Usenet articles, but that topic is beyond the scope of this essay.

I wish to make clear that by putting the recipes in my database, in no way am I claiming to revoke the copyright of the message originator. I will remove recipes upon request, and I will not archive recipes that say "do not archive" or that have a copyright declaration or the X-No-Archive header. The rec.food.recipes FAQ does say that recipes from the newsgroup end up in this archive; I proceed on the assumption that this is common knowledge. If I take recipes from other places (which isn't often) I will mention on the forum that I'm doing so. I try to be sensitive to other people's concerns.

What are you allowed do with the recipes? A lot.

You may print out or download recipes for your personal use. You may download the entire shebang to your personal system, so long as it's for your use only.

You may give printouts of recipes to your friends, relatives and associates or forward them copies of recipes in email.

You may use recipes for socials, bake sales, parties, and any other occasion where you might need to prepare a menu item.

You may post individual recipes to Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists. If you do so, please say you got them from here (so I don't rearchive and end up with duplicates).

You may freely post the URL to the net and let other people know about the archive (this activity is encouraged!).

Permission is granted to reproduce a small number of recipes (40 or less) for educational or informational purposes, such as newsletters, reports, papers, newspaper articles, school assignments, cooking classes, and the like.

Permission is granted to use a limited number of recipes (250 or less) for community type cookbooks, provided you credit the site URL somewhere in the book. If you do this, please consider sending me a copy of your cookbook to the postal address below.

Permission is granted to publish the URL and/or up to 5 screen shots of individual webpages in a book, magazine or similar publication.

Permission is granted to use a small number of recipes (40 or less) for promotional purposes (i.e. handing out recipe cards at your cafe).

Permission is granted to make static links to single pages on the site. We recommend that you link to the top page only (http://recipes.taronga.com/) to help reduce dead links. (Neosoft has no affiliation with the archive whatsoever - they serve as the hosting site only - and they tend to get frazzled when people write them asking about dead links. Please don't bother them about it).

Permission is NOT granted to provide an alternate user interface to this site (a search engine, for example).

Permission is NOT granted to reproduce the database in part or whole on any other publicly accessible website or medium such as CD, print form, etc.

This is not to say I am averse to commercial use of the database. If you are interested in purchasing a non-exclusive one-time license, please contact me at the email address below.

Finally, if anyone thinks they're up to the task of building their own database from scratch, more power to you! I do it mainly by directly saving articles out of our newsfeed. These recipes end up in the "Incoming" directories, which I edit and file time permitting.

I hope this clears up any previous confusion and staves off future misunderstandings.

Stephanie da Silva
PO Box 720711
Houston, TX 77272
arielle@taronga.com

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rec.food.recipes archive © 1993-2008 Stephanie da Silva
Web pages © 1995-2008 Peter da Silva