Posting published recipes on social websites?

I’ve been playing around with www.brewology101.com to house my recipes and have been mostly happy with it. Of course, there are lots of other sites out there that do the same thing. One common feature is the ability to make your recipes public for others to share. I’m generally a big fan of this approach, as I am with sharing recipes on this forum.

Lately, most of my recipes have been based on NB kits or those found in Zainasheff’s book Brewing Classic Styles. Sometimes I tweak things a bit but often I’m just doing the recipe as is. Either way, I note the source in the notes.

What do you all think about that? I paid for Brewing Classic Styles and I try not to use any of the NB recipes without buying the kit at least once. I’m all in favor of sharing information but I don’t want to compromise the living made by those who developed my recipes. As of now, I’m marking them Private in the software so they don’t get shared.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor did I sleep at Holiday Inn last night.

IMO, it depends on how you’ve named your recipes and the level of tweaks. If you post a Red Ale recipe based on NB’s irish red but you’ve changed the hops addition as a tweak, and name it, “Donovan’s Red Ale,” then in my book its a foul. But, if your posted recipe is named “Donovan’s Red ale (based on NB’s Irish Red)”, then no harm no foul…and don’t make your readers have to read the fine print for the real owner.

Finally, If you used their red ale as a starting point, and have significantly changed the recipe over countless iterations of the brew, and it no longer resembles their original recipe…it’s yours. Be proud!

Just my 2 cents.

:cheers:

Recipes can not copyrighted or trademarked.
If people want to keep their recipes secret they can not publish them.