Recipes are all around us. We find recipes that become favorites and mainstays for our own families. Printed cookbooks, from friends and family, old recipe boxes, magazines, newspapers, websites are all sources of great recipes.
When we find a new recipe, we often will modify that recipe to make it our own. Sometimes it is by eliminating some of the ingredients, adding different ingredients for different amounts of the ingredients, or simplifying the directions. All are ways that we make a recipe our own.
Family cookbook project makes it easy for you to get these recipes into your own family cookbook. Whether you type them in, cut and paste them from a document or website or upload an image of the recipe, we make it easy to collect your favorite recipes in one printed cookbook.
However, we also have a responsibility to those people who created the original recipe. It is very appropriate in your personal note to include the source of the original recipe.
While it is generally accepted that recipes cannot be copyrighted, photos certainly are. If you add a photo from a recipe that you found until you’ve been able to make the recipe and replace it with your own photo, you should mark your recipe private so it is not shared with anyone else outside your cookbook.
For further reading, here are some links to articles on copywriting recipes.
Copyright Office flyer on recipes
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
Copyrighting Recipes
http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/copyright/copyright-realworld/recipe-copyrighting.html
Questions & Answers – Copyrighting Recipes
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/CookbookAdvice.htm
Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.
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