Germany Says Taking Photos Of Food Infringes The Chef's Copyright

from the no-#foodporn-please,-we're-german dept

Over the years, Techdirt has had a couple of stories about misguided chefs who think that people taking photos of their food are "stealing" something -- their culinary soul, perhaps. According to an article in the newspaper Die Welt, it seems that this is not just a matter of opinion in Germany, but established law (original in German): In individual cases, shared pictures may be illegal. At worst, a copyright warning notice might come fluttering to the social media user. For carefully-arranged food in a famous restaurant, the cook is regarded as the creator of a work. Before it can be made public on Facebook & Co., permission must first be asked of the master chef. Apparently, this situation goes back to a German court judgment from 2013, which widened copyright law to include the applied arts too. As a result, the threshold for copyrightability was lowered considerably, with the practical consequence that it was easier for chefs to sue those who posted photographs of their creations without permission. The Die Welt article notes that this ban can apply even to manifestly unartistic piles of food dumped unceremoniously on a plate if a restaurant owner puts up a notice refusing permission for photos to be taken of its food.

It's sad to see this kind of ownership mentality has been accepted by the German courts. As a Techdirt article from 2010 explained, there's plenty of evidence that it is precisely the lack of copyright in food that has led to continuing innovation -- just as it has in other fields that manage to survive without this particular intellectual monopoly, notably in fashion.

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Filed Under: chefs, copyright, food, foodporn, germany, infringement, photographs