Q. I wonder about the legality -- and the spirit -- of your approach. How can you quote other cooks' recipes without securing formal copyright permission?

A. The short answer is that we don't quote them.

Q. How can you change the recipes and publish the adaptations without receiving explicit permission?

A. The short answer, again, is that we don't need permission.

Before we haul out the lawbooks, let's talk about the spirit of the enterprise.

It sounds as though you think we're harming the authors of the cookbooks we use. Can you say a little more about what kind of harm you think we're causing?

Q. Won't the authors get hurt feelings when you change their recipes around?

A. They might, but we hope they won't. We're not disrespecting a recipe by changing it . . .

Or rather, in general we're not. Every once in a while we stumble across a recipe that seems deeply flawed, like Heidi Swanson's gnocchi alla romana recipe, or Mollie Katzen and Walt Willett's cheese omelet recipe.

We don't go out of our way to find bad recipes, but sometimes they pop up in books we think are otherwise worthwhile. Everybody makes mistakes. (Heaven knows we do.) When we want to bring a brilliant, wonderful, useful book to our readers' attention, it behooves us to point out flaws we know about. Otherwise we're just shills. Loving a book doesn't preclude noticing its flaws; noticing a book's flaws doesn't preclude loving it.

Criticizing a bad recipe might hurt an author's feelings, but any kind of bad notice can hurt any author's feelings. Do you think reviewers should write only favorable movie reviews? Or only favorable book reviews?

Q. Maybe unfavorable book reviews are OK, but cookbooks seem different. Don't you think you should at least follow the author's recipe once to give it a fair chance?

A. One of the things we're trying to teach people at alteRecipes is that you don't always need to make a recipe in order to see how you need, or want, to change it.

For instance, if a recipe serves 8 and there are only two of you going to eat it, knowing how to scale it back could be very handy, and there's no reason for the author to be hurt.

Q. I grant you that, but don't you also say you make recipes healthier? Isn't that an insult?

A. Most of the changes that make recipes healthier are based on pretty universal beliefs about nutrition. If fiddling with ingredients and methods can change an author's recipe from a once-a-year treat to a once-a-month treat, that seems like a compliment, not an insult.

Q. OK, I kind of understand what you're saying, but you're always going on about making recipes easier, and that's great, but sometimes you kind of make fun of the authors for telling you to do things you say are too hard, or not worth the effort.

A. Right. But we also report honestly when we try to make a recipe easier and it doesn't work out. Like for instance the black bean and mango salad. We've validated the author's original instructions, and we're the first to say so.

Q. What I really want to ask about is when you say you make something tastier or more delicious. How can you make disparaging remarks about cookbooks and recipes without risking a libel suit?

A. There's absolutely nothing you or we or anybody can say without risking a libel suit. Every time you utter a word there's the possibility that some loon is going to decide to sue you. Our only concern is to make all our statements ones we will relish hearing repeated over and over in a court of law.

It is entirely possible that we will at some point write about a cookbook that we think is wonderful but not perfect and that the author of that cookbook will have hurt feelings because "wonderful but not perfect" is not good enough, why didn't we say the book was "just exactly perfect"? That hurt author may well get a lawyer and take us to court. It could happen. But it would be daft.

Q. Don't you think you would lose the libel suit, if you're saying you make a published author's recipe more delicious?

A. We try to stress that we mean tastier to us, not tastier in some absolute sense. The author made the recipe to her own taste, what she published was utterly delicious to her. De gustibus non est disputandum, or everybody's welcome to their own opinion.

Q. That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. You don't take things seriously, you're always making smart-alecky remarks.

A. Again, that's part of the point we're trying to get across to people. It's not serious, it's just dinner.

Q. It still seems kind of illegal to me.

A. Many people don't understand about copyright, so let's try to walk through it together.

What does the author own when she owns the copyright to her writing? In the case of a cookbook author, what does the author own when she owns the copyright to her recipe?

Q. I thought I was supposed to ask the questions.

A. OK, fair enough. Let's pretend that we invent a recipe and put it up on alteRecipes, a recipe for, let's say, chocolate soup with banana dumplings, something unusual, not just one more recipe for meatballs and spaghetti.

A month later, we're browsing on the Web and we find a recipe for chocolate soup with banana dumplings. Is that recipe illegal?

Q. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yes. To me it seems like that other website stole your recipe from you.

A. Not everything that's wrong is illegal. Being snotty to your parents is probably wrong but certainly not illegal. So is stealing our recipe illegal?

Q. I can tell from the way you're asking that it's not illegal, but I can't see why it's not. You made up that recipe, and it should be yours. What does copyright mean if they can't get in trouble for copying your recipe?

A. We don't own the recipe. Copyright has nothing to do with the recipe. All we own is the words in which we conveyed the recipe.

Q. You mean if they take your recipe and rewrite it in their own words they then own the recipe?

A. Nobody owns the recipe. All they own is their words.

Q. But they're plagiarists!

A. Maybe so, and it certainly would be nice if they would credit us, but you can't steal something that no one can own.

Q. Where does it say that in the law?

A. The Copyright Act is very clear on this point:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

Q. Well, how about the words "chocolate soup with banana dumplings"? Don't you own those words?

A. They're not of sufficient substance to copyright. Maybe if they were to rhyme -- "Chocolate soup, don't you snoop, sitting out on the kitchen stoop, with banana Anna manna in her dump-dump-dumpling droop." We could probably copyright that arrangement of words if we wanted to.

But still the only thing we would own is those words in precisely that arrangement, not chocolate soup with banana dumplings, not the idea of chocolate soup with banana dumplings, not the ingredient list and the measurements of chocolate soup with banana dumplings.

Q. So all the way back at the beginning when you said you don't quote the authors' recipes, what you meant was you don't use their exact words?

A. Precisely.

Q. That seems sneaky to me. Isn't it pretty easy to rewrite somebody else's recipe in your own words?

A. Try it some time, it's harder than it looks. And if we really are trying to be sneaky, we're pretty incompetent -- we always publish the original authors' names, book titles, and page numbers.

Q. What if you made up a name for the recipe, like chocolicious badumpling cocosoup? Couldn't you copyright that name?

A. Nope, can't copyright a title (which is why you can have many books that share the same name). If we want to make a product called Chocolicious Badumpling Cocosoup, or Chocolicious Badumpling Cocosoup Mix, we could trademark the name. Trademark is different from copyright in a couple of ways: You have to show that you have a product or service signified by the trademarked item; you have to show that you really are selling it, or trying to sell it; you can trademark a symbol rather than, or in addition to, a particular word or arrangement of words.

Q. What about if you made one box of Chocolicious Badumpling Cocosoup Mix and promised you'd make more if anybody wanted to buy them?

A. You're getting into an area about which we know nothing. We've never had anything to trademark.

Oddly enough, however, we do have some experience with made-up words. When m-c was writing the appendix on frying, she found that there's one particular kind of frying without its own name, so in desperation she made up a name for it, a hideous name: "frynto" (rhymes with pinto).

If there were some product or service we wanted to call Frynto, we could trademark the name. Everybody in the Patent and Trademark Office would laugh their heads off, but we could trademark it.

We're not, however, selling Frynto anything. Our ambitions are writerly rather than commercial. We've always loved it that Diana Vreeland invented the word "pizazz" (great word!) and wished we could invent one too. "Frynto" is . . . not so great. But who knows, with frequent repetition "frynto" might grow on English-speakers. Ah, to be immortalized in vocabulary.

Q. There's another example of how you make fun of everything.

I'm going to go away and think about this some more. It seems obvious that what you're doing is underhanded and you ought to be stopped. (You scoundrels, you.)

A. Come back when you have more questions.

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