That might seem the most natural of all, on the face of it. Food is a social thing, from the sharing of recipes to the sharing of a meal. But it's a different kind of sharing to that we associate with other arts. Sharing a recipe isn't an economic issue for the food industry like sharing a song is to the music industry -- but what if you could print off not just a hamburger, but a Big Mac? For a look at how this future might turn out, let's look at the Coca-Cola recipe. (...)
The spread of Open Cola is interesting, given this framework of secrecy. The terms of the Open Cola GNU license are such that anyone can take the recipe and adapt it, as long as they put their own version online for others to also take advantage of. Take Open Soda in the US, which produces a range of different colas and sodas both for fun and for selling at large events. Its latest recipe, as of April 2009, has some significant differences with Open Cola, but it's still a cola. It's still an attempt at cloning something famous. (...)
Imagine yourself in twenty years sitting down in your kitchen and wanting a glass of cola and a hamburger. You could download Coca-Cola's classic recipe to go with a McDonald's Big Mac, but you could also download that extra-caffeinated cola someone's hacked onto the server along with a Big Mac with a particularly smoky ketchup in place of the banal, "official" version. Or you could knock something new up yourself, a drink that's sugar- and caffeine-free and with an extra shot of vitamin B and a burger bun that's gluten-free.
Open Cola can be see a first, extremely crude example of this change, in this case. Once the infrastructure for 3D printing is in place -- the cultural expectation of being able to get home, slot a cartridge into the machine, and print out anything you want -- then the food industry is going to struggle to keep its secrets safe. In large part, the mystique around the brand is what protects Coca-Cola -- in For God, Country & Coca-Cola, Pendergrast is told by a Coke spokesperson that he could safely print the real recipe if he had it and go into competition with Coke, but there's no way an upstart would be able to match the real thing for price, distribution, marketing, history, and all the other things that maintain Coke's position around the world.
But if it did want to sue someone who overcame these hurdles -- as the decentralised 3D printing might well facilitate -- then that's made trickier for the copyright/patent holder with the legal grey area recipes lie within. A list of ingredients isn't something that can be copyrighted, but their preparation in a certain way can be -- that's how you can copyright a Jaffa Cake, but not the ingredients within in. Coca-Cola currently relies on established legal precedent, such as that in the Coco v Clark case of 1969 that established an employee leaking a trade secret was in breach of a confidentiality contract, and could be sued.
Kurman and Lipson have collaborated on Fabricated: the new world of 3D printing, a book exploring the social issues that will come from the spread of 3D printing. Lipson said: "The moment somebody is making money off the recipes, that's when you'll see digital rights management around it. But it's very social, there's a big social component through sharing these things, and therefore it will propagate and follow the same path [as music]."
by Ian Steadman, Wired UK | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
