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shadylady wrote:CrustyOldFart: Except that not all menial laborers are ditzes and not all people with white collar jobs are intelligent. The lady in the video is supposedly a lawyer. She doesn't seem very smart, but somehow she's managed to be labeled as a lawyer in this video. I suppose it can be argued that becoming a lawyer doesn't necessarily require intelligence, just a really good memory for illogical details.... Okay, come to think about it, maybe intelligence could get in the way of becoming a lawyer. I don't know anymore!

Intelligence is not required if you are mindlessly conforming to the expectations of stupid people. That is true and much of our legal system seems to have been designed by stupid people. Actually I think our legal system has developed haphazardly as the result of randomly inconsistent rulings of judges who interpreted and applied laws in often arbitrary ways in order to accommodate the desires of those they sought to please. Possibly our legal system is in need of an overhaul. As a society we seem to have developed a dysfunctional set of priorities during the last few decades. The law caters to the needs of the very poor and the very rich, leaving reasonable people in the middle with a long list of disadvantages.

George Harrison’s $1.6 Million Mistake
Three notes should not be misconstrued as a basis for a copyright violation. It takes a lot more than just three notes! Judges without commonsense should be removed from the bench!

Judge was likely a Elvis fan.

This is a Problem
Wanna quick summary of fair use law and SLAPP? Here ya go!

Twitch streamers panic as clips feature triggers copyright notices
This is problematic. Actually there are quite a few issues discussed in this news clip, but I really have a hard time with a company being able to take down a video because of incidental background music. That strikes me as a gross violation of free speech rights.

Proving Similarity
Some interesting cases involving pop music discussed. Music evolves and similarities are unavoidable.

pcslim: Disputes within the music industry are interesting, but it seems that similar disputes can occur in the case of cookbooks. Lots of recipes are just variations of standard traditional recipes and I would imagine that some people would like to claim that a variation of a traditional recipe which they published would be their intellectual property even if it is actually the case that it's just a common variation which hasn't been published before. Such an argument might not just apply to cookbooks, but also video presentations where cooks share their recipes. It would be interesting to know how many recipe copyright disputes have wound up in court!

Copyright Answers: Are Recipes Copyright-Protected?
So it looks like I'm finally getting around to answering my own question and generally speaking the answer is potentially yes, but for the most part no.

CAN YOU COPYRIGHT OR TRADEMARK A RECIPE?
The answer given here leans more towards an absolute no, but I think if you publish a recipe which is exactly (word-for-word) the same as one that is already published, then the answer would lean more towards yes. So, if you're going to start publishing recipes, then you can probably publish the ingredient list exactly as it appears somewhere else and you might get away with the quantities being identical, but when you get to the instructions, you should definitely reword here and there and maybe add a little info not included in someone else's published version of the recipe.

Youtube copyright seriously pisses me off..
Watch the entire video. It gets weirder and weirder. YouTube copyright is broken!