I just want to ask you all for your opinion about selling someone else's recipe. Is it ethically justified to adapt & sell e-juice recipes available online? If so, maybe do we need to credit the person who made it somehow?
Because in the F&B industry, clones & adaptation has always been done. I am asking this because of an entrepreneurship project that I'll be working on and I'm thinking about trying to market my diy e-juices, which some are adapted from recipes available online.
I don't think anyone really has an issue with selling recipes to friends and family. If you plan on making a business out of it, you might run in to some criticism and pushback if the recipes are blatant rip offs, but if they are adapted and tweaked then it shouldn't be an issue. The bigger issue is regulation. If you plan on selling one-shots online, make sure you're aware of the current regulatory landscape and it'll prob be a good idea to get a lawyer. It's hard out here in the streets these days.
It's like saying you can't bake a cake and sell it. Someone at some point come up with a certain recipe.
There's a reason foodstuffs generally can't patent a certain recipe, instead they patent a manufacturing process or name / brand / look of a product.
If you're selling as a xxx clone, I'd say that's pretty shady, because you want to profit off of the association to a presumably well liked juice, but if you market under xyz juice I don't see the issue, there's countless adaption of all kinds of recipes out there.
There's even those that buy pre mixed flavours and just dilute it in to the base and sell as their own.
If you change the recipe, it's not really someone else's. I mean, look at the absolutely obscene number of strawberry & cream juices on the market. The recipes of them are all pretty much adaptations of each other.
Now, if you 'adapt' - say... 'Pickle Rick' I think you may be a) crossing a line, and b) certifiably insane if you think it's going to grab more than a niche market (ie: gag gifts and/or people with odd tastes.)
If I sell one of /u/ID10-T's recipes because a mate asked for it and I have the stuff. I'm charging for raw materials, my time and my own hobby investment. In Australia, people are glad to find someone selling nicotine ejuice - any flavor that isn't 100% PG apple perfume is just butter.
And if you did that, I wouldn't mind at all.
It would be like if I wrote a cookbook and you prepared one of the dishes in it and sold it to someone. Yeah, man, of course do that. Please do that. You bought the ingredients, you put in the work to prepare it. I wouldn't have published that cookbook if I didn't want you to use it.
Now, if you copied one of the dishes in my cookbook and put it in your own cookbook, or sold it to a restaurant for them to profit from my work, or otherwise did anything that involved claiming or implying it was your own creation, then we'd have a problem.
> Now, if you copied one of the dishes in my cookbook and put it in your own cookbook, or sold it to a restaurant for them to profit from my work, or otherwise did anything that involved claiming or implying it was your own creation, then we'd have a problem.
This is an issue a lot of new sellers seem to be having on the classifieds. They're trying to pass off 1:1 ATF recipes as their own and that's simply not ok if credit is not given. For instance, at least 5-7 of the recipes that I sell have the simple sugar cookie base or a modified version of it. (Kinda hard not to put Cap SC and Cap VCv1 into a recipe these days...)
Me n Hash had a talk about this sometime last week. A few of my recipes started as 2-3 flavor mixes from ATF that evolved into complex recipes and I sell them as my own. When I first started selling, I told people that and caught a little flak for it. But people tend to forget that "inspired by" and "directly copied from" are two different things.
There is a fine but important line between inspired by and copied from, I think. It's really NOT OK to sell an exact copy of someone's recipe and not give credit for it. That's plagiarism, same as the kind of plagiarism that should get you kicked out of any college if it were an academic paper you were passing off as your own for grade instead of a bottle of juice you were passing off as your own for a few bucks.
You might get different opinions on whether or not it's ok to sell in the DIY classifieds an exact copy even if you do give credit where it is due. Personally, I'm ok with it. The classifieds are not Big Vaping business. For the most part, these are just fellow DIYers supporting their hobby/addiction. And in the process, making it cheaper and tastier for people do what we're all here to do, Harm Reduction. DIY classified sellers who aren't doing shady shit are, IMO, comrades in arms of mine in the war against cigarette-related illness and death. But yeah, if you're copying something, give credit where it's due, please. It's the right thing to do. It might even be a selling point. Maybe even offer a tiny little $omething to the creator; 9 times out of 10 they'll probably just appreciate the gesture say no, thank you, do you homes. I've had someone approach me with "I've made XXX dollars selling your recipe to people in my neighborhood, I feel like I owe you something." I let them send me some flavors to try that I didn't have yet and said we were square.
Inspired by? That's another story. And people do seem to forget that there's a difference between copied from and inspired by. Or even "appears to be copied from or inspired by." For one thing, I'd be willing to bet I've created a recipe that you could find almost exactly the same published somewhere else before mine and it just happened that myself and someone else reached the same conclusion independently, that these five ingredients at approximately these %s would taste great. Like two cultures a world apart with no contact coming up with oddly similar dishes. Monkeys with typewriters, and all that. Custardy cookies, I mean, come on. There are only so many ways to do that. But even if it's something as specific and esoteric as Raspberry-Apple Macaron, unless they're calling it "Rhodonite" or you've tasted them side by side and can't tell the difference, maybe put down the pitchforks or at least hold them at parade rest instead of being so quick to jab those pointy fuckers all over the place. Nobody owns a flavor profile... except maybe Grack Juice, I don't know if there are that many monkeys and typewriters in existence. And yet I've seen people 0 to 60 in 5.2 right to "THEY STOLE WAYNE'S RECIPE BURN THEM RAPE THEIR WOMEN ENSLAVE THEIR CHILDREN" because someone is selling a juice with a suspiciously similar description. How do you know it's not the same profile but without one single ingredient in common? Calm down, people.
Let's say that something really is inspired by, though. Are you morally obligated to give credit for "inspired by?" I don't think so. At least not necessarily. Kinda one of those let your conscience be your guide situations. However, if you think of yourself as an artist and stand up guy, you probably will, because you'd want people to do the same for you. And if someone gets upset because you're selling something "inspired by" their work and you've given them credit, then they suck. But even if you haven't done the "I based this off of.." or "I tweaked so and so's tasty whatever sauce," credit-giving thing, if it's not a direct copy or mere token alteration, and you are just some mixer in the classifieds and not a money grubbing juice business, then they should get over it.
Personally, my favorite thing about sharing recipes is when they result in an "inspired by." "I love your recipe" is great. But "Your recipe inspired me to create this" is next level. I fucking live for that shit, inspiring people to take something I did and make it better, or at least better to them, to put a little of themselves in it and enjoy it even more. That is my jam.
Speaking of which, did you try Longing and enjoy it? If so, there's a KILLER Recipe called "Ardent" in this month's monthly thread; check it out.
Sorry bout writing you a rambling novella. Just your bad luck to reply to one of my comments on a night when I'm having what appears to be the onset of a manic episode.
Sigh....
Single recipes aren't even copyrightable. Unless there is specific process you are using that is novel. Just a list of ingredients and their ratio isn't enough to warrant copyright. However, the "name' or "brand" can be a trademark and you can't use that. Talk to a lawyer if you want confirmation.
I think of it like plagiarism. Taking something written by someone else and claiming it as your own writing and profiting from it, that's obviously wrong.
Learning from something written by someone else and building on that knowledge to write your own thing is completely different. Giving credit to the person you learned from is nice, I'd imagine you'd want them to do the same for you, but it's not always necessary or feasible.
Take someone's recipe, and make it better. They use custard? Try finding a better one, or cutting the custard down 20% and adding another custard to fill that missing 20%. If your lazy simply add a few drops of sweetener, then it's not the same recipe. There's flavor enhancers that you could simply add one drop of and it's technically unique. Think about how many off brands of Dr.Pepper or even just cola there is and don't worry about it too much.
Maybe I should also state the condition of the e-juice market here. For the regulation part, the whole vaping industry here is almost untouched by regulation. You can easily market your vaping related product online and to local vape shops without having to worry about taxes/regulation/etc. Only the big boys (big companies) have to deal with tax/government officer concerning legal issues, tons of small businesses (vape shops, e juice manufacturer, even mod craftsmen) remain untouched by tax & regulation.
And it's not just the vaping industry either, even copyrighted consumer goods gets duplicated easily here. Although if you're unlucky you might get sued if the company who holds the copyright managed to find you. Even then the company would still have to allocate a lot of time & money just to sue you and go to court, so most of them wouldn't even bother since there are tons of copies (usually cheaper and lower quality) available in the market.
So as you can imagine, I think there's already tons of recipe duplication in the e-juice market here without the original creator ever knowing it. To be honest, it feels wrong and I don't want to follow the same path as they do since it is ethically unjust, especially for the part where you duplicate others' recipe and make a profit out of it (don't really care about regulation though XD). So since the DIY reddit community has contribute a lot to my DIY e juice making, do you have any tips to credit the original creator of the recipes I adapt my juices from? Say maybe listed their name on the label or some sort?
It sounds like you're trying hard to make sure you're doing the right thing even though you could easily get away with not doing the right thing. You're good people. I like you.
Contact the recipe creator. Anywhere you can find a recipe, you can find contact info for the creator. Tell them you want to sell their recipe. Make it clear that you're just some guy who mixes juice and not a big ejuice manufacturer, you're not planning on making big bucks. Tell them you appreciate their work and want to know how to give them credit for it. They'll tell you what to do. If they don't give you permission, then you should respect that and not do it. Plain and simple. You might even find yourself in a legal situation if you plagiarize a recipe from Alltheflavors.com. Definitely don't do that. Obviously.
Now, that's if you're wanting to sell a direct or very close copy. If it's merely something that is inspired by someone else's work, or an adaptation, maybe you could say that somewhere in your description of the juice for sale? It probably wouldn't fit on the label, but a tiny line in an online description that says something like "This was based on XXX recipe by XXX - if you're interested in mixing your own juice, here's a link to their other recipes." That sort of thing.
But probably the most meaningful thing you can do would again to be to reach out to the creator. Since it's an adaptation and not a copy you don't necessarily need permission. But thank them. Like, "I made this juice by making a few changes to a recipe you created that I really enjoyed. I'm selling it in my country and it's done pretty well. I just wanted to to say thank you for sharing that recipe." IMO, a sincere thank you goes really a long way in the DIY community. But you do need to change the name, the description, and actually something meaningful about the recipe itself, not just half a percent of sweetener added or something like that, so that it really is an adaptation and not a rip off.
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