Intellectual Property of Food and Hospitality: From Sybaris' Banquets to NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge

Nuno Pires de Carvalho, widely honored for his incomparable research in the origins and development of intellectual property, has devoted a considerable portion of his writing to the role this field of law plays in specific areas of human endeavor, including medicine and fashion. In this book, he brings his meticulous scholarship to bear on how society has constructed intellectual property so as to adapt it to the needs of the industries of food and hospitality and how entrepreneurs have extracted from intellectual property the most appropriate means for capturing knowledge and reputation in these two fields of business.

Presenting a comprehensive collection of more than two hundred documentary sources illustrating this evolution since antiquity ¬– with notes explaining the context and relevance of each source – the book delineates the enchainment of important moments in the development of intellectual property in the context of food and hospitality. Along the way, the book details the particular development of such specific aspects as the following:

• rules against unfair competition among food producers and preparers;

• patents for culinary recipes, foodstuffs, and hospitality services;

• exclusions from patentability;

• marking of goods and containers;

• inventions of devices and processes in food preparation;

• identifiers in such industries as cutlery, baking, winemaking, cheesemaking, and brewing;

• emergence of intellectual property for plant varieties;

• database protection for organized compilations of recipes.

To illustrate some of the peculiarities of intellectual property as applied to food and hospitality, the book includes numerous pictures of patent and copyright claim documents, trademarks, advertisements, labels, culinary book covers, and food preparation devices.

Because of the multiple nature of the human activities behind it, food calls for every variant of intellectual property. Thus, this matchless volume will be of great interest to all concerned with any branch of intellectual property law, including practitioners, academics, magistrates, government officials, and even the legal community as a whole. The book will reveal not only the ways intellectual property evolves and adapts to social changes but also how intellectual property law accommodates the needs and aspirations of entrepreneurs in the fields of food and hospitality.