Guilty

I can see that for a large company with a physical business address. For smaller ones that may start with 1 or 2 people working on it where that address might be their home I would go with anonymous too. A P.O. Box is also an option assuming that would work. Look at diyordievaping that is registered anonymously but I wouldn't say he is up to shady things.

Well you can clearly see my opinion above, but in all defence when I had to register a domain for a company, I had to consider that the actual physical address, name and phone number were being used at the time (since it was just a small company the registered address was the home address of the owner).

This could be risky, since there are crawling bots that go over whois registries, mining the data and start sending out spam emails (or worse).

Yea. The intent of posting is sharing. . A liscense agreement probably wouldn't work either. There's no consideration on our end. There might be. I'm too tired to think it through, but there are also no damages if there was never an intent to sell it. But fuck the law, that's a dick move. I wouldn't be happy about it for sure and it's things like that which make people not want to share. Freedom fries ftw. Some people are assholes.

I'm actually really happy you brought this up because I'm doing my contracts outline and it was a nice review. I spent a while on westlaw and lexis researching this, and I thought some people might find this useful, so I'm going to go ahead and post. I am not an attorney (only a lowly 1L) and this does not constitute legal advice. It is only for reference in case someone wants to research it further.

Copyright usually will not protect recipes posted. Copyright was established to protect expression of ideas. This is fundamentally different than a recipe. The courts have not held recipes, specifically listing ingredients, as protected by copyright law: > quoted text "Hasset's recipes comprise of lists of needed ingredients and directions for combining them; there is no expressive elaboration upon either. Without some "minimal level of creativity," see CMM Cable Rep, 97 F.3d at 1519, Hassett's cited recipes are not themselves copyrightable. See Publ'ns Int'l, Ltd. v. Meredith Corp., 88 F.3d 473, 480, 482 (7th Cir. 1996) (finding recipes comprising only lists of required ingredients and directions for combining them as lacking "even a bare modicum of the creative expression—i.e., the originality—that is the 'sine qua non of copyright'" (quoting Feist, 499 U.S. at 345)); Tomaydo-Tomahhdo, LLC v. Vozary, No. 15-3179, 629 Fed. Appx. 658, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 18384, 2015 WL 6143350, at 3 (6th Cir. Oct. 20, 2015) (finding recipes excluded from copyright protection where ingredients were mere factual statements and instructions were only functional directions); Lambing v. Godiva Chocolatier, 142 F.3d 434, at 1 [published in full-text format at 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 1983] (6th Cir. 1998) (unpublished table decision) (same); see also Lorenzana v. S. Am. Rests. Corp., 799 F.3d 31, 34 (1st Cir. 2015) (finding that a "recipe—or any instructions—listing the combination of chicken, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and mayonnaise on a bun to create a sandwich is quite plainly not a copyrightable work"); cf. Nat'l Nonwovens, Inc. v. Consumer Prods. Enters., Inc., 397 F. Supp. 2d 245, 256 (D. Mass. 2005) (instructions for boiling wool felt were purely functional without any stylistic flourishes or other forms of creative expression and therefore unprotected). Viewing the recipes as a whole does not change the analysis. See Nat'l Nonwovens, 397 F. Supp. 2d at 256. The recipes generally are "functional directions for achieving a result" see Lambing, 142 F.3d 434, at 1 [published in full-text format at 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 1983], and consequently not protected under copyright law. Hassett v. Hasselbeck, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41171 (D. Mass. Mar. 29, 2016).

Not only do the court's not protect recipes, but the also do not protect compilations of recipes. It may protect them if there is a valid copyright and the work is exactly the same but its doubtful:

> quoted text "Hassett's final alleged similarity is based on the "information" and "compilation of research" she claims Hasselbeck copied. To the extent she is] alleging that Hasselbeck copied facts and other information which Hassett devoted time to research and compile, the claim fails. Hassett's general effort does not alone afford her protection from others using her facts or research in the future, so long as there is sufficient differentiation between the expressions and collected facts themselves. See Feist, 499 U.S. at 345-46, 359 ("As § 103 makes clear, copyright is not a tool by which a compilation author may keep others from using the facts or data he or she has collected."); id. ("[T]he facts contained in existing works may be freely copied because copyright protects only the elements that owe their origin to the compiler—the selection, coordination, and arrangement of facts.") Here, the selection and arrangement of any purported overlapping facts are sufficiently distinct such that there is no protected similarity between the sections to which Hassett points. See Hassett, 757 F. Supp. 2d at 87-89.Hassett v. Hasselbeck, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41171 (D. Mass. Mar. 29, 2016).

This probably puts any remedy clearly into the realm of contracts via terms of service of the medium in which it is posted. This means that if you post on a third party's site, and they have terms of service (not a license, which is given to a copyright holder in order to grant use of their expression of an idea or software). That means that you would have to sue the host of the site since, as a user, you do not have a contract with the alleged infringer (which doesnt matter, because infringement is a federal claim and contracts is generally a state claim). They could then sue the third party. If you owned the domain, had a valid contract sustained some injury, AND could find the location of the person or site it was posted on, you may have a cause of action for breach of contract in state court(or federal court, if you had diversity of citizenship and met the $75,000.00 amount in controversy limit), or if you had a valid copyright (which is basically impossible for recipes) a cause of action for infringement, in federal court (because it is a federal statute and thus, a federal question) provided that you could find a venue (court) that had subject matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction. A recipe posted in this manner is not a trade secret either, because by posting it, your intent would preclude your argument. I would hate to be the one to stand up in federal court and try this.

Sorry it's hard to read. Has to be cited. Most of the parenthesis in there are various holdings on this issue. Remedies for damages arising from infringement are statutory. If its a contract claim, you must show damages. Damages are derived from injury, and without an injury, you can only sue for nominal damages or an injunction which isn't as fun.

I'm only posting this because I know I've seen this brought up in various places. Just know, when you post a recipe, you have no remedy for some punk ass jacking your shit. It's a moral issue. But if I had a popular diy recipe site with a small disclaimer in the corner, I might add some terms.