In Battle of the Cookbooks, the Seinfelds Come out on Top

[WSJ Law Blog]

Early last year, we blogged about a budding copyright lawsuit between two authors — one with a famous last name (Seinfeld) and one with a less famous last name (Lapine).

We wrote:

Missy Chase Lapine sued Jerry and his wife Jessica yesterday, accusing them of ripping off her cookbook. Lapine complained about the alleged similarities a few months back — here are past stories from the WSJ and NYT. Lapine, the author of “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals,” claims that Jessica Seinfeld plagiarized her cookbook with Harper Collins’s publication of “Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food.” Click here for a copy of the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages for copyright and trademark infringement.

Fast forward 20 months or so. On Thursday, after all the motions (of which there were many) and heavy-hitting lawyering (of which there was much), Manhattan federal judge Laura Taylor Swain rendered a fairly resounding verdict to Seinfeld, ruling that while there was some overlap in the ideas behind the two cookbooks, there wasn’t enough overlap in the expression of the idea to constitute copyright infringement. Lapine also wound up suing Jerry Seinfeld, alleging he had defamed her publicly. That claim was dismissed Thursday as well. Click here for the opinion. Writes Swain, on the copyright issue:

Plaintiffs’ description of the allegedly protected expression –“giving instructions for making vegetable purees in advance, storing them for future use, and then using them in specially created recipes which include the pre-made purees as ingredients,” – is so abstract as clearly to fall into the category of unprotectible process or idea. It remains nothing more than the very idea that Plaintiffs recognized as unprotectible: hiding vegetables in foods children enjoy. Plaintiffs’ inclusion of process details, primarily focused on time-saving techniques, is insufficient to transform an unprotectible idea into a copyrightable expression of that idea.

Said Gibson Dunn’s Orin Snyder, the lawyer for Seinfeld: “It’s an enormous victory. It confirms what we’ve been saying since Day One, that this was an inappropriate lawsuit to begin with.”

A call to Howard Miller of Girardi & Keese, counsel to Lapine, was not immediately returned.