Lawyer walks into a bar … - medical center information, medical center, health care, disease, medical journal

Copyright on cocktails? Really? Chantal Martineau at The Atlantic:

Last month, at Tales of the Cocktail, a week-long convention for the spirits industry in New Orleans, Eben Freeman, best known as the creator of smoked Coke and “solid″ cocktails at the now-defunct Tailor in Manhattan′s SoHo neighborhood, gave a seminar on protecting one’s intellectual property as a bartender. The panelists, Sheila Morrison from the Trademark Office, and Riley Lagesen, who has a private business law practice with a niche focus on the restaurant industry, discussed the nature of a bartender’s creative work and who is allowed to use it. After the seminar, I spoke to Freeman, who admitted he came up with the idea for the talk after becoming fed up with other bartenders and establishments taking credit for and profiting from his recipes and techniques. (Fat washing, for example, the process by which a spirit can be infused with, say, bacon, was pioneered in part by Freeman, yet is often attributed to others.) “Someone needs to get sued … to set a precedent,” he told me.

So, can a cocktail be copyrighted? In short, no. The publication of a recipe can be legally protected, but the “expression of an idea,” as the lawyers in the seminar explained, cannot. It’s the reason musicians can’t be sued for covering another band’s song in a live show. But few bartenders publish their recipes. They tend to pass them on as an oral tradition.

Okay, so she gets the part about live performances of cover versions all wrong, but let’s focus on the drinks part. I think Ezra Klein has it right:

As is always the case with granting individuals legalized monopolies over intellectual property, we should start by asking whether consumers are suffering because bartenders don′t have enough financial incentive to innovate interesting new drinks. Given that the past few years have seen an incredible explosion in creative mixology, that’s a hard case to make. The status quo seems perfectly good at encouraging innovation –

Indeed – what problem would new copyrights solve?

I’m not so much a cocktail person myself … maybe with one exception.

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