Right, you had a question. You have four potential tools for protecting recipes: copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
- Copyright. You can forget about protecting a single recipe under copyright law (it's hard enough to protect a book of them) as we discussed in this blog entry.
- Patents. As for patent law, you may be able to patent a method for preparing a seafood sauce but (a) you'll probably have a hard time proving novelty), (b) it takes more than a year to get a patent, and (c) the recipe will be published for the world to see.
- Trademarks. You can reserve your trademark at the USPTO provided that you have a bona fide intent to sell the sauce. Trademark protection, combined with savvy marketing is the typical scenario for protecting sauces and condiments. Alternatively, you may wish to try and find some celebrity (or pseudo-celebrity) who can raise the awareness of your marketing and in that case, the mark may relate to the celebrity endorsement. We're not saying we wouldn't have bought our George Foreman big grill and little grill if it weren't for George. But we might not have heard about them without the name association.
- Trade secrets. Many famous recipes are maintained as trade secrets -- Coca Cola being the most well known. You would use nondisclosure agreements with your manufacturers and distributors. Anyone can reverse-engineer and use your secret method but that doesn't seem to have had any effect on Coke sales.
Speaking of seafood. We're featuring our favorite seafood sandwich, the Reuben sandwich made with halibut and prepared by the world's greatest seafood restaurant.