Via Peter Suber, un billet très interessant sur on the common sur l'absence notable de l'utilisation de la propriété intellectuelle dans la haute cuisine française :

A French chef whose restaurant is given an extra “star” in the famed Michelin Guide (on a scale of 1 to 5) can expect a flurry of new patrons, prestige and profits in the coming year. Similarly, restaurants that “lose” a star can see sales drop as much as 50%. Since there is so much money riding on the quality of food served in top French restaurants, why aren’t the recipes and food preparation techniques used by great French chefs protected by copyrights, patents or trade secret law? The answer, as explored in a fascinating paper by Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel, is that the social norms of the culinary professionals are a more effective tool for protecting the “proprietary” interests of top-flight chefs....Any chef who violates these norms is stigmatized or even ostracized by the community....

Von Hippel is the MIT professor who has long studied user-driven innovation, most recently in his book, Democratizing Innovation. (See my earlier post on this book.) Fauchart teaches at the Conservatoire des Arts and Metiers, in Paris. After sending out a detailed questionnaire to 485 French chefs who had been given some form of recognition by the Michelin Guide, Fauchart and von Hippel studied the 104 responses and conducted ten in-person interviews. In their paper, “Norms-based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs,” the researchers identified three strong social norms that assure that the culinary commons works effectively.

First, “a chef must not copy another chef’s recipe innovation exactly….The community acknowledges the right of a recipe inventor to exclude others from practicing his invention, even if all the information required to do so is publicly available.” Second, “if a chef reveals recipe-related secret information to a colleague, that chef must not pass the information on to others without permission.” And third, “colleagues must credit developers of significant recipes (or techniques) as the authors of that information.” [...]

Peter Suber nous rappelle au passage un des principes fondateurs de l'Open Access :

Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

Cette discussion est basée sur un papier intitulé Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs.

Pour des alternatives saines à des pages de licences obscures, de brevets incompréhensibles, et de procés très chers pour soutenir l'innovation, une liste de lecture chez Siwssroll "Production collaborative entre pairs" (par votre serviteur dans les commentaires).

Une citation pertinente de Victor Hugo sur l'équilibre entre le public et les auteurs :

Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l'auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient - le mot n'est pas trop vaste - au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l'un des deux droits, le droit de l'écrivain et le droit de l'esprit humain, devait être sacrifié, ce serait, certes, le droit de l'écrivain, car l'intérêt public est notre préoccupation unique, et tous, je le déclare, doivent passer avant nous.

PS : "Open Sauce" est une référence au journal "The Inquirer".

AJout 20060913 2149 : Via techdirt, le milieu de la mode demande plus de protection(nisme) du gouvernement USA, discuté sur Against Monopoly et chez Greg Mankiw.