Which just shows the ridiculousness of the patent system. I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical. I guess cooks just didn't have the same lobby power to get their exception reworked (pharmaceuticals were in many places originally excluded from patents as well)
> I mean what is the fundamental difference between a cooking recipe and the recipe for a pharmaceutical.
The effort required for validating them. Pharmaceutical compounds can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars just for the clinical trials and certifications of production steps, and on top of that comes the cost to failed attempts which are rolled into the pricing of products that do make the cut.
A cooking recipe however, unless you're dealing with stuff like fugu fish, will not kill or injure those who replicate and eat it, and there's no regulatory hurdles to pass.
I mean, it looks like culinary recipes by themselves should be able to be patented (not copyrighted, patented), regardless of whether they are "industrial" or not (I mean industrial is only about scale, you can have very complex processes in ordinary kitchens)
Either this or processes to prepare food shouldn't be patented at all
I would think if you embedded a recipe for sugar cookies in a convoluted story about how you tried different kinds and amounts of butter, sugar, leavening, and flour that you could probably copyright the story and leave derivation of the recipe as an exercise for the reader.
