Licensing issues with putting your recipes in the cloud
April 12, 2013 6:53 PM   Subscribe

Using a crowd-sourced recipe service--how do licensing requirements affect intellectual property rights? Are there any such recipe sites that have licensing agreements that are more protective of the member's rights than others?

I've decided to get rid of a large number of index cards that contain recipes I've gathered over the years. Most of these are recipes handed down from the relatives of friends, invented by the people I got them from, or taken from long-forgotten books. They are relatively unique, so I want to make sure I don't lose them.

The thing that concerns me is that I have heard about crowdsourcing efforts that turned against the crowd. For example, Compact Disc Data Base was started as an open-source effort to have users put in track data about their CDs. But it was bought and made closed-sourced, which meant that original users had to pay to continue to use it under its new name, Gracenote.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has run across a recipe service that has terms of service that say that something like that would never happen. Barring that, I am looking for a way to back up my recipes in case I no longer have free access to them.
posted by xenophile to Food & Drink (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Somewhat related to your answer is the following. Sorry, I don't have a specific answer, or at least not yet.
Recipes: US copyright office

Recipes aren't covered by copyright, basically, though works related to them (IE a picture of the finished dish, a description of the meal, etc.) may be.
posted by gryftir at 7:04 PM on April 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


The basics of recipes - a list of ingredients, mix a with b, cook at temperature X - are not protected by copyright law, so I would guess that someone could theoretically close off your access to uploaded version.

The simple way to make sure you always have access to them is to open a gmail account, and email them to yourself. Then you'll have them as long as the gmail account exists.
posted by fings at 7:07 PM on April 12, 2013


I have a big Word doc for my recipes saved to my Dropbox account. Dropbox keeps things in the cloud, but it also creates a folder between whatever devices you have and syncs that folder with every other folder/device, so even if they go out of business you'll always have a local copy. Maybe not the best way to do it but that's how I do it. I know lots of people that swear by Evernote for recipes, too.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:38 PM on April 12, 2013


I set up a super simple blog on blogger and can email recipes to it. In theory my family can also email recipes to it but yea right. But they can at least look at it. One day they'll thank me.
posted by jacalata at 7:49 PM on April 12, 2013


recipes.wikia.com uses a Creative Commons license by default, I think. Wikia is a sort of commercial spinoff from Wikipedia and while they cram advertising in everywhere as you browse around and do everything else they can to monetize the content, the idea is still that someone can copy it all and use it anywhere they like.
posted by XMLicious at 10:35 PM on April 12, 2013


I've been using grouprecipes for years with no problems. But I just checked their terms and found:
We reserve the right to terminate your right to use or access the Site at any time without notice. If your rights to access the Site have been terminated you are no longer authorized to be a User of the Site or use it in any capacity.
As others have said, the only way to guarantee you'll always have access to your recipes is to keep a personal copy. As for the best way to do that? Really, it's whatever works best for you. I have my recipes in individual Word docs.
posted by zinon at 1:25 AM on April 13, 2013


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