A recent article in Allrecipes about intellectual property and "stealing recipes" had us chatting about how we all feel about attribution, inspiration, and those instances where we're pretty sure someone has used our stuff without properly crediting us.
We published edited excerpts from our conversation in our This Week at ChefSteps newsletter, but here's a snippet from Nick:
Nick: I try to keep in mind, especially with bigger institutions, that a lot of times it isn’t the creator of the recipe who’s publishing these things. It’s hard to know the dynamics of the team that’s pushing things out. Maybe their editor has said they didn’t need to credit someone; maybe they just didn’t bring it up with their editor. You never know. It’s easy to get upset and jump to being really frustrated, especially if it seems like someone’s taken something you or someone you know worked really hard to produce.
I think attribution is important, but I hate how quickly these things escalate on social media. It gets aggressive quickly. There’s a civil way of saying, like, “Hey, this feels very similar to something I did.” Or, “Hey, this reminds me of work Tim Chin did.” It does two things. It tells the person that we see the work—we see what you did. But also, it tells other people to go check out Tim Chin, which is the point of attribution.
I like the way it’s done in breakdancing. Tim and I both were into breakdancing, and it was really common in the culture to just call copying out—copying stuff is called “biting.” There were even hand symbols for it. I think, “You stole from me!” is aggressive, but I wish there was another term that we could adopt to call out people for not crediting others properly.
Because I think credit is really important, not just for the individual who did the work in the short term, but for the community—it’s all we really have right now. We are a part of a larger community of people that are inspired by each other, and I think back fondly to the days in restaurants when you’d hear of new techniques spreading, permeating the culture, and hearing how the techniques were evolving. It helped make you feel like part of a larger community.
Any other thoughts from the ChefSteps community? Any ideas for a shorthand phrase for "biting" that we can use for unscrupulous recipe developers?!?
