Carmines Part Deux

[Adam W]

Depends on if Carmine's bothered to trademark or copyright the material.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe that's necessarily true.

Cool. Perhaps you can google us up a few examples

Well, I believe it would come down to Carmine's being able to show it was their original work (and they were using it first) and that this other place copied it. But I wouldn't even know how to google that. Maybe one of the resident lawyers could weigh in on this...

[Adam W]

Depends on if Carmine's bothered to trademark or copyright the material.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe that's necessarily true.

Cool. Perhaps you can google us up a few examples

Well, I believe it would come down to Carmine's being able to show it was their original work (and they were using it first) and that this other place copied it. But I wouldn't even know how to google that. Maybe one of the resident lawyers could weigh in on this...

What would you sue them for?  Like what charge?

Copyright infringement (or whatever the legal term is). Accoring to Wikipedia:

In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office.

I believe the USA is a signatory.

[Adam W]

Having a copyright is a condition precedent to any suit to enforce it, all the Berne convention really does is make copyrights issued in signatory countries enforceable in the U.S. without first having to be domesticated. Only reason I even know that is I have a case where the copyright holders are in Italy and Cyprus and their software is being stolen over here, I got kind of a crash course in it.

As far as this restaurant goes, if the menu is literally like a photocopy or something, then that would be one thing, but if it's just one restaurant offering the same dishes as another restaurant, then I dunno what you'd really do about that. No court is going to agree that only one guy is allowed to put bacon on a pizza, that's absurd. Regardless of whether they copyrighted the actual design of their menu, if some other restaurant serves a pepperoni pizza, or whatever, then WTF are really going to do about that? It's a sleazebag move, just not one that you can really do anything about.

Thanks for the clarification, Chris 

I thought the issue here was the use of the same names, etc in addition to the ingredients. Your point about ingredients, though, makes a lot of sense.

We have a pizza place across the street from us that has pretty much ripped off the menu of a national pizza chain. I don't know if they've just not been found out yet, but they've managed to stay in business (and haven't renamed any of their pies).

[ChriswUfGator]

Having a copyright is a condition precedent to any suit to enforce it, all the Berne convention really does is make copyrights issued in signatory countries enforceable in the U.S. and vice-versa without first having to be domesticated. Only reason I even know that is I had a case where the copyright holders are in Italy and Cyprus and their software is being stolen over here, I got kind of a crash course in it.

As far as this restaurant goes, if the menu is literally like a photocopy or something, then that would be one thing, but if it's just one restaurant offering the same dishes as another restaurant, then I dunno what you'd really do about that. No court is going to agree that only one guy is allowed to put bacon onto a pizza, that's absurd. Regardless of whether they protected the actual design of their menu, if some other restaurant serves a pepperoni pizza, or whatever the dish is, then WTF can you really do about that? Nothing.

It's a sleazebag move, sure, but not one that you can really do anything about. FWIW the history of chefs stealing from each other probably dates back to the day after the first restaurant opened up over in ancient babylon or wherever. The best was eating at the yacht club and being served bang bang shrimp straight off Stephen's old Boomtown menu. It's been part of the game as long as there have been restaurants.

[ChriswUfGator]

Having a copyright is a condition precedent to any suit to enforce it, all the Berne convention really does is make copyrights issued in signatory countries enforceable in the U.S. without first having to be domesticated. Only reason I even know that is I have a case where the copyright holders are in Italy and Cyprus and their software is being stolen over here, I got kind of a crash course in it.

As far as this restaurant goes, if the menu is literally like a photocopy or something, then that would be one thing, but if it's just one restaurant offering the same dishes as another restaurant, then I dunno what you'd really do about that. No court is going to agree that only one guy is allowed to put bacon on a pizza, that's absurd. Regardless of whether they copyrighted the actual design of their menu, if some other restaurant serves a pepperoni pizza, or whatever, then WTF are really going to do about that? It's a sleazebag move, just not one that you can really do anything about.

Thanks for the clarification, Chris 

I thought the issue here was the use of the same names, etc in addition to the ingredients. Your point about ingredients, though, makes a lot of sense.

We have a pizza place across the street from us that has pretty much ripped off the menu of a national pizza chain. I don't know if they've just not been found out yet, but they've managed to stay in business (and haven't renamed any of their pies).

If it's named something like the "Carmine's Extra Special Super Secret...blah blah blah" you could conceivably have an issue, but if it's just a list of food items like "Pepperoni Pizza....BLT Pizza....French Fries..." or whatever, then what are you going to do? Even if it were super-specific, you'd still have an impossible time doing anything about it. For example Carmine's has a "Badass BLT Pizza" let's say the other restaurant used that exact name, it's still just opinion speech, the word "badass" has been around forever, and if another chef thinks his BLT pizza is badass too then he's certainly entitled to express his opinion.

[Tacachale]

I'm no lawyer, but I know a good bit about this stuff through work. Basically, it might be possible to copyright the design of the menu, but you can't copyright the actual items on the menu, like lists of ingredients and toppings, names of dishes (no matter how creative), slogans etc. Things like that are specifically not copyrightable by federal law. Explanatory or descriptive text in the menu might be copyrightable, but it seems very unlikely anyone would bother to do that.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf

Additionally, it is possible to trademark names of dishes and slogans. Trademarks don't need to be registered in order to be defended ("TM" means it's an unregistered trademark), but if they're not, Carmine's would basically have to show that the infringer was trying to pass themselves off as Carmine's and/or that they'd lost business due to the confusion. I doubt it would be worth the restaurant's time and effort even to bother with this matter.

[thekillingwax]

Are you guys going to show the menu to Carmine's? Welcome to unwanted litigation, Efe's...

Depends on if Carmine's bothered to trademark or copyright the material.

Besides which there are a lot of assumptions going on here.

Does anyone know if efts has the same owners or creators as Carmine's?

And it might be true that fee was there first, and that Carmine's is the copy.

It's not reasonable to assume either way.

Efe's just opened a month or two ago and they have a pretty huge and crazy menu- most of it seems to be of the mediterranean variety. I really don't think the Carmine's people would open a place across town and not mention it to anyone. My wife said the food they had was actually really good- someone even had escargot but the copying of the pizza menu is pretty bad. With that said, they may have hired someone to put together their menu for them and they did this- the folks at Efe's may not even know about Carmine's. Not sure.

Don't wanna see lawyers involved but they really need to change it for their own sake because it makes them look bad.