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RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi has publicly accused Brooke Bellamy, known as Brooki, of plagiarising two of her recipes in her bestselling cookbook Bake with Brooki.
In a statement on her website on Tuesday, Maehashi pointed to near identical ingredients and instructions for her caramel slice and baklava recipes.
Expressing her disappointment, Maehashi pointed out the ethical implications of recipe plagiarism in her statement and said that if Bellamy had sought permission, she would have granted it and “proudly promoted” her book at its launch.
“I’m no stranger to seeing my recipes copied online,” she said.
“But seeing what appeared to me to be one of my recipes printed in a book launched with a huge publicity campaign from one of Australia’s biggest publishers was shocking.”
In her statement, Maehashi said Bellamy’s cookbook had made an estimated $4.6 million in sales in under six months.
What has Bellamy said?
Bellamy has denied the allegations, saying that all 100 recipes in her book were developed over the years, starting in her childhood.
She provided dated Instagram photos from 2016 as evidence of her original creations. Bellamy also offered to remove the disputed recipes from future editions of her cookbook to avoid further conflict.
“I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years, since falling in love with baking as a child and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen,” she wrote on her Instagram stories.
“I immediately offered to remove both recipes from future reprints to prevent further aggravation, which was communicated to Nagi swiftly through discussions.
Source: Instagram / @brookibakehouse
Source: Instagram / @brookibakehouse
The situation intensified on Wednesday when the United States-based food blogger Sally McKenney also accused Bellamy of copying her vanilla cake recipe, which she said was originally published in 2019.
Legal and ethical implications
In her statement, Maehashi said: “Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical, even if it is not copyright infringement, and undermines the integrity of the entire book.”
But Dr Matthew Rimmer, a professor in intellectual property and innovation law at the Queensland University of Technology, said in Australia, copyright law does not protect the idea of a recipe itself.
“This is about what’s called the ‘knockoff economy’, which is a wide range of different areas in which usual intellectual property norms don’t really operate. For example, standup comedy as well as cooking recipes,” he said.
“There’s been quite a bit of academic discussion as well in terms of areas that do not fairly fit squarely within fields of intellectual property. This case would be one of them.”
Rimmer said allegations of ‘plagiarism’ don’t typically apply to recipes, as the concept is most commonly associated with literary works.
“Not everything is going to be able to be protected by copyright. So you’re going to have to think about other regimes of intellectual property. In this instance, I think this is more of a question of ‘passing off’ or consumer law.
“If someone has a substantial identity, someone else can’t pass off that and misappropriate their business reputation, but that is something that would need to be proven.
“Maybe there is a claim that is also being made there that there’s some sort of misleading and deceptive conduct, but that’s going to be difficult to prove on the basis of a couple of standard recipes.”
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