The Intellectual Property of Food and Hospitality: From Sybaris’ Banquets to NASA’s Deep Space Food Program - A Sourcebook

The Intellectual Property of Food and Hospitality is a book in which the author brings his meticulous scholarship to bear on how society has constructed intellectual property 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. 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.

What’s in this book:

Exhibiting a comprehensive collection of more than two hundred documentary sources delineating this evolution since antiquity—with notes explaining the context and relevance of each source—the book depicts the enchainment of essential moments in the development of intellectual property in the context of food and hospitality. Along the way, the book elucidates the particular development of the following specific aspects:

• 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 shed light on some of the peculiarities of intellectual property as applied to food and hospitality, the book comprises numerous pictures of patent and copyright claim documents, trademarks, advertisements, labels, culinary book covers, and food preparation devices.

How this will help you:

Considering the multiple nature of the human activities behind it, food calls for every variant of intellectual property. Thus, this nonpareil 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 how intellectual property evolves and adapts to social changes and how intellectual property law accommodates entrepreneurs’ needs and aspirations in food and hospitality.