It’s pretty common these days that when you are served your food, especially if they look particularly impressive, photos will be taken of it and posted onto social media like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. This lets you tell your friends and your followers where you are and what you are eating. Apparently people like that kind of stuff.
However it seems that over in Germany, there is a chance that taking photos of your food could count as a copyright violation. This is according to an article in Germany (via Techdirt) where it claims that the way food is arranged can be considered art, which in turn your taking photos of it and sharing it online without the chef’s permission is a violation of intellectual property.
Presumably this applies mainly to fancy restaurants where plating the food served is an art form on its own, as much as the way the food has been prepared and cooked, but as it turns out it can apply to just about any restaurant that serves you food on a plate, especially if the establishment has warned you and has put up signs telling you not to take photos.
That being said we have to wonder how many will actually bother to enforce this. After all posting photos and sharing information is free publicity for the restaurant or cafe, but what do you guys think? Do you agree that in certain cases it might be grounds for a copyright violation?
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