About a year or so ago, I was doing a search for Thai recipes when I
came across a website for an importer of Thai foodstuff - ingredients,
cookware, etc. I looked through their extensive recipe collection and
thought that it looked rather good, but something about the recipes rang
familiar. I searched other links and came across the Philpotts' recipes
(Ian and Muoi) that I had seen in various newsgroups and mailing lists
in years past and was happy to have found them again. When reading
through a few of them, I realized that the recipes found on the
retailer's website that they had claimed to be their own recipes, were
in fact those written by Ian K. Philpott - some of the recipes had the
occasional measurement change, but the description, ingredients, and
methods were the same, word for word (except in situations where Ian
wrote "my wife", the retailer swapped "we" or "our").

I wrote to the retailer and asked them what was up - the response I got
was that the recipes were indeed found online, but that they took a lot
of time in testing out each recipe, blah blah blah. But that didn't
explain why the Philpotts' recipes were claimed as the retailer's own,
word for word with no credit given to the Philpotts whatsoever. I also
contacted the owner of another website who did have the Philpotts recipe
collection, but he gave credit where credit was due and he was aware of
the situation with the retailer, but he felt that piracy was so rampant
that his hands were tied and he felt that there was nothing to be done.

So, a recent discussion on another group recipe copyrights made me
think about this retailer again. Maybe if enough people raised a stink
about it, they'd either give proper credit to the Philpotts or they'd
take the recipes down instead of trying to profit off of them. What
would you do? Yeah, maybe I shouldn't care so much because it's not
hurting me personally, but I knew Ian through the few mailing lists that
we were both members of before he passed away and so in a very small
way, I feel like his "legacy" needs to be protected, y'know?

N.