Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking.

U.S. copyright law protects all kinds of creative material, but recipe creators are mostly powerless in an age and a business that are all about sharing.

In 2011, the cookbook editor Rux Martin noticed something unsettling on the cover of a women’s magazine: a vanilla cupcake decorated with yellow, cream and white jelly beans arranged to mimic corn kernels, a faux butter slice made from a yellow fruit chew, and black and white sugars to imitate salt and pepper.

The confection looked just like the corn-on-the-cob cupcake in “Hello, Cupcake!” a best-selling 2008 cookbook she had edited. Yet the accompanying recipe gave no credit to the authors, Alan Richardson and Karen Tack. “It was so specific, down to the corncob holders,” Ms. Tack said. “It wasn’t a twist on it. It was just like ours.”

Ms. Martin wrote to the magazine expressing disappointment, but never heard back. She asked a lawyer for her publisher whether they could do anything about the identical feature.