Well, for one thing, they're just not that old.
- And for another, my secret recipe is my own, from hard-won experiment and experience. I can't attribute these to a mythical, ethnically-appropriate, media- and meme-friendly grandmother. The one who did cook probably would have rejected any credit anyway.
The disturbing part of this story, though, is the implicit directive to the author to modify his/her/their factual content for perceived enhanced marketability that is not actually related to the subject matter. If I'm trying to cook a tasty prawn vindaloo, I can't rely on someone's grandmother's recipe anyway… if only because the ingredients she used are not available to me, and vice versa. (I promise, though, that granny isn't in the sausages…)
- But at least I know better than to assert copyright in my link-sausage recipes. Or any other recipes. My tales of a past encounter with one of the asserting law firms (not, to be clear, any of the individual counsel appearing in the record in Coscarelli) might be copyrightable, even though they relate to recipes, if they were expressed with sufficient originality; the Joe Friday approach would not be sufficient.
Which is precisely why recipes are not protected by copyright without more substantial embellishment: Facts are not copyrightable.
- And it appears that the UCC is dead. No, not that one, "beloved" of law students and commercial lawyers throughout the US; this one, essentially beloved of only Hawley and Smoot. OK, there are a few other reasons that there was non-European resistance to the Berne Convention (starting with that pesky "fair use"/"fair dealing" problem because the US has the First Amendment, and continuing on to the historical disdain of Spanish publishers for Latin American Spanish), but as of now, UCC nations: You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.
- And then there's the flip side of intellectual property in general, and copyright in particular, to consider: Not passing GO. (The only "free parking" I've seen of late has been for actual monopolists and monopsonists.) Remember, intellectual property rights are an overt exception to antitrust law and doctrine. That said, I haven't seen an awful lot of "consumer welfare" arguments have any traction anywhere around intellectual property; the closest IP ever gets is FRAND regarding established standards, and even that's functionally a limitation on non-Ricardian rents and not on rights.
At noon, I'll start my annual 31 December ritual: Locking the doors until noon on 01 January. I'll be off the roads that way (as if the 13" of snow on the ground might not do something about that, too).