cozinha e IP

The Knockoff Economy: Copying and Creativity in Cuisine (Volock):

.. Many great chefs, including Ferran Adria himself, have argued that an open, shared model of innovation is what works best in the culinary world. These chefs—though not all—are very skeptical that copyright protection for recipes or built food would promote more innovation—quite the opposite. We also look at the role of social norms in constraining the depth of copying, drawing on the work of some economists who have studied Michelin-starred chefs in Paris.

The bottom line is that in cuisine copying coexists comfortably with creativity. Now, as readers will surely notice, cuisine and fashion do not lend themselves fully to digitization, and so copying a dish is different than copying an Mp3 file. Of course, copying a recipe digitally is very similar to an Mp3, and in this comparison lies a few of the major points of the book. Let us just mention two.

One, creative fields differ in many respects, ranging from cost of production to susceptibility to digital copying. Our IP system, by contrast, does not draw many distinctions, and to the degree it does, it distinguishes crudely. Two, copying can be blunted when a good is analog rather than digital. Recipes and songs can be digitized and copied very easily using current technology. But built food and its musical analogue, live performance, cannot. So one significant lesson from the world of cuisine (and high end bars, which we also discuss) is that creative industries can prosper even in the face of widespread copying by shifting revenue models toward hard to replicate goods, like restaurants (hard to copy) versus recipes (easier) in cuisine, or live rock shows (hard to copy) versus recordings (easy) in music. In these instances we’ve just provided, restaurants and rock concerts are both a sort of live performance, in which consumers look for and hopefully get an experience which is hard to copy. In the case of recipes and music recordings, these are more easily replicable products – especially recordings, which can be copied perfectly.

We’ll end with one last interesting tidbit. Cookbooks, full of recipes that can be readily found (copied) on the internet, would seem to be a great candidate for a music industry-style economic implosion. But in fact, the cookbook industry is booming. Can you guess why?