Well now. It's a common cookbook, isn't it? Common in the sense of shared, as well as in the sense of ordinary. So what do we need with copyright law?

In some respects, we don't. Common Cookbook is a United States creation, hosted on a United States site, and United States law does not allow a bare-bones recipe (a list of ingredients, quantities, and steps for combining them) to be placed under copyright at all. (The principle is that such a recipe is merely a documented method for doing something -- the method may be creative (and so could be protected by a method patent), but the documentation is not.

Trouble is, as soon as we depart from that extremely limited format, we begin creating copyrighted material. I received the recipe for LionHouseRolls as just a list of ingredients and quantities. But if I add the one phrase, "exceedingly soft and tasty," I have fixed an original work in tangible form -- and that spells copyright. Which means, by default, that you-all cannot edit what I posted and add your own remarks, experiences, recipe variations, and so on. Not too much better than a print cookbook, and not too common, except in the sense that means base, low, or mean.

(Yup. It's true. Under the Berne Convention, which the US has signed along with just about everyone else, the moment you independently fix an original work in tangible form, you own exclusive copyright therein. At a minimum, this includes the rights to display, perform, copy, distribute copies, and create new works derived from the original. In some countries (but not the US) it includes rights to be named as the author and not to be defamed by any use of the work; and in the US all copyrights are subject to some exceptions under the vagaries of fair-use law. The point is that for a shared-authorship cookbook, the rest of us need somehow to get from you, at a minimum, the right to display and the right to create derivatives. And we don't need there to be any doubt about it.)

The other trouble is this: Although the Common Cookbook is a labor of love -- it is a labor. We put in time and effort in order to make it what it is. We could dodge the first trouble by putting it in the public domain ... whereupon some disreputable such-and-such could seize upon it, strip our names from it, print it in a best-selling book, and rake in the dough, the fame, and the nasty, nasty karmic backlash. If he were really an SOB, he could even accuse us of ripping off his copyright work, and force us to prove in court that we had it before he did. Okay, not very likely (though if there is a greedy SOB chef out there somewhere, chances are good he's on the Internet). A more mundane threat of the public domain is that lousy and outdated copies of all of our stuff could be spread without attribution across the Internet, clogging up the search terms and drowning out our new and improved version.

So we are going to keep your material under copyright, you being the rights-owner. However, the act of putting copyrightable material on this site constitutes an implicit agreement to license it to the other contributors, and to the whole world, under certain terms. You cannot revoke this license (but it is designed to be reasonable, so that you won't have to).

• If no other copyright status is indicated, then by default, contributions are licensed to the entire world (including the other Common Cookbook contributors) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, version 2.5. This allows anyone to copy and distribute what you wrote, and also create new works based upon it, but they must keep your name attached to it (if you supplied it), they must not turn a profit from your work or their adaptation of it, and they must offer their adaptation to the world under the same terms.

• If, for some reason that I cannot foresee, you need to contribute a text that we cannot be allowed to change, you may put it on its own page (not included in an existing page that is under the license discussed above), indicate clearly, at the top of that page, that it is not to be changed, and sign it by linking it to your UserPage. (It would be a good idea to put a link to it on your UserPage, too, so you and we can keep track of it.) Under these circumstances, it is considered licensed to the world under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, version 2.5, and also licensed to the Common Cookbook contributors under the most recent (highest-numbered) TyopCorectionLicense. This still offers anyone the right to copy and distribute your work, on non-commercial grounds, while keeping your name attached if you provide it; but it does not allow the general public to create any work based thereupon. However, the TyopCorectionLicense does allow the other writers on this site to fix your spelling, clean up your layout, rewrite phrases that are hard to read, and make other similar minor changes, placing the copyright of the new and improved version back in your hands.

These licenses do not prevent individual authors' doing anything they want to with material that they, themselves, own. If I put up my recipe for SlowCookedCountryRibs on Common Cookbook, and then later decide that I want to print it in my own, commercially-sold cookbook, I can do that. If I want to license it to someone else who will own sole copyright in an interpretive dance based on it, I can do that too. What I can't do is snarf someone else's remarks that were added to that recipe here, and use them except in the attributed, non-commercial way allowed by the Creative Commons license. (Unless, of course, I persuade that author to license those remarks to me under terms that I like better.) Nor can I take away the version of my recipe that does exist on this site; once it's here, it or its descendent will always be available for noncommercial use at no cost. To be as generous with knowledge as we are with the actual foods we make is, to me, an integral part of CommonCookery.

Finally, and I hope I don't have to say this, after all this talk about being fair, it stands to reason that you should not contribute anything that you don't have the right to contribute. We gotta respect other people's copyrights too.

P.S.: If you actually want to relinquish more control over your writings, I recommend that you place them on a site of your own and apply either the Public Domain Dedication or the Primarily Public Domain status (depending whether or not your jurisdiction allows you to waive copyright and/or license away your droits morale).