Dining Restrictions Management
Suppose the world’s high-class chefs awoke this morning consumed by a fear that their recipes would be used in ways they didn’t intend. Suppose they were tortured with constant visions of people going home after a nice meal at Chez Indulgênce and whipping up an enormous vat of the asparugus gazpacho they just paid $10 for. The more extreme of these visions may involve serving the gazpacho to other people or modifying the recipe without permission! Suppose these chefs suddenly felt compelled to protect their creations, at any cost, from the legitimized espionage of the recipe-swapping black market.
Might as well try to stop the tides, right? Cooking is inherently an open process — when you eat dinner at a nice restaurant, you can guess 90% of what’s in it and how it was made, just by looking at it and tasting it. But most restaurants provide much more. The food industry has learned that maximizing openness maximizes customer satisfaction. With all these conventions in place, what’s a paranoid chef to do? I offer some advice.
- First thing to do is make the menus more vague. The average swanky menu has twelve to fifteen items on it, each accompanied by a biographical sketch of the ingredients, as well as a detailed account of their preparation. Sometimes, these menus are published online, which invites recipe-swappers to steal ideas without even paying for a meal at the restaurant! That’s got to change. Dish descriptions must reveal only enough information to let a customer decide whether they want to order the dish. Something like, “Lamb with a red, sour-ish sauce and some kind of potato.” Diners don’t need to know how the lamb is cooked, what the sauce is made of, or the exact type of potato. Anyone who inquires about such things should be regarded with suspicion, and their bill should be “accidentally” miscalculated by the waitstaff.
- No more cookbooks (too easy to photocopy) or contributions to cooking magazines. Cooking shows should be available only on DVD, so as to dodge the Tivo-armed bandits. But really, why tempt fate by recording the creation of your dishes at all? If you want to make your trade secrets a public spectacle, don’t come crying to me when you find your trademark wasabi cheesecake being sold on Taiwanese street corners for $2 a pie.
- Chefs should also consider selling secret sauces and other complex ingredients, so as not to give away recipes for crucial components of their ouveres. Why should I publish my famous barbecue sauce recipe in Gourmet when I can instead invent dishes which require generous helpings of Big Dan’s Secret Sirloin Slather, now available at your local supermarket?
But chefs who are truly suspicious of their customers will find these measures insufficient. The abstract challenge is how to exercise maximum control over the customer’s process of eating at your restaurant, so that your food gets eaten (and paid for) but none of your proprietary culinary information leaks into your patrons’ theiving minds.
- You can tell a lot about what you’re eating just by looking at it, so you want to start out by blindfolding people as they walk into the restaurant. Don’t wait until they’re seated at the table! Customers have been known to recconoiter as they’re being led to their seats.
- Even if customers can’t see the food they’re eating, they can still reverse-engineer recipes with remarkable precision by taste or touch. If left unsupervised, they may covertly hide portions of their meal in their napkins for future analysis, but even in an epicurean Panopticon, a clever customer could store food in his or her cheeks, chipmunk-style. A device exists which could close this breach. Originally invented in the 1930s to increase worker efficiency, it could easily be repurposed to protect you from your patrons:
- Finally: doggie bags? Don’t be silly.
So, I worked a little bit with the Free Software Foundation on their new Defective by Design campaign, and that’s the analogy that kept coming to mind. Restauranteurs aren’t preoccupied with the scourge of recipe sharing — lucky for them, since it saves them from an exercise in futility.
The music and movie industries, on the other hand, are terrified by their producers, distributors and customers. At every step in an album’s lifecycle, from its inception in the studio to the moment it comes out your speakers, there is a way to copy the information and subvert its restrictions. If you protect songs on iTunes, someone can rip the CD. If you protect the CD somehow, someone can pipe the music to a recorder instead of their speakers. And even if you manage to lock down your customers’ computers, it just takes one guy in a production studio to leak an album to the Internet to render your complicated, expensive DRM endeavors worthless.
Nevertheless, they’re trying. That whole recording-music-from-the-speaker-jack workaround? Hollywood has floated legislation to mandating all video recorder doohickeys to have their input jacks approved by movie studios. And then there’s the Sony rootkit misfire that reads like a modern-day Chelm story. Sony didn’t want computers to be able to see its audio CDs. Unfortunately, in order to do that, they had to mess around with some of the deep internals of the operating system. The software that did this was automatically installed when you put in the CD. But what if users find the software and uninstall it? Well, Sony also made sure that the software was invisible — which required further twiddling with fragile operating system components. Computer security professionals discovered the spyware and caused a stink (like copyright infringement, it only takes one savvy geek to make your secret copy-protection tactics useless), but it’s doubtful that Sony saw the uproar as a sign of the futility of DRM.
This stuff annoys me because I’ve run up against silly DRM obstacles many times while trying to make legitimate use of my media, and no other industry is so hell-bent on destroying its relationships with its customers. It would be interesting to do a Guns, Germs and Steel-style analysis of the cultural, political, psychological and economic pressures that made the food industry so different from the music industry. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rip my music into ogg vorbis and wait for Songbird to release a Mac client.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:14 am
Heh. I do like the analogy. The food industry is so open compared to the music industry. There’s another interesting aspect to the analogy — the parts of food prep that are hard to reproduce are easy to keep secret; likewise performance. The difference is substantial, though. Recordings last, food doesn’t. It’s like the music industry if there were still no recordings. To get a chef’s food, people have to keep going back to get a performance; this is no longer the case with music, since you can listen to the same performance over and over. Also, if more people were more interested in performing like their favorite bands (cooking like their favorite chefs) it would be more analogous. But there’s no need for that now that recordings exist, so many fewer people are interested.
You need to fix your markup — your A tag on Songbird is missing a href. It’s killing the LJ display of the feed.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:34 am
The analogy between food and music, as I’ve written about it here, doesn’t match up well at the component level. You’re right: restaurant dining maps to live performances. Albums correspond more to cookbooks, and cooking shows correspond more to a band appearing on Leno or whatever.
But cooking (on a small scale) is actually my favorite analogy for computers, because recipes match up rather nicely to music, movies, programs, or anything else that can be boiled down into abstract information. It just so happens that the industry that has grown up around cooking makes for an interesting comparison with other content industries.
(also: fixed)
(also: now I’m hungry)
May 31st, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Yay fixed.
I don’t think that albums do correspond to cookbooks. The purpose of a cookbook is to allow you to cook like the person who made the book, to do “performances” of their recipes. It’s more like sheet music in that respect, although both sheet music and cookbooks vary in how close they allow you to get to the original. My big point is that there is no componentwise analogy I can see that gives an equivalent to albums, which are the main thing that the record industry is currently hugely preoccupied with having stolen. However, it is interesting still, because recipes ( = sheet music for individual songs) are not copyrightable, and sheet music is. I wonder what the rationale is. Chefs do somehow make it with a great deal less protection than musicians.
June 25th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Well don’t we all wish that the draconian tactics of the rich to get richer weere brought to an abrupt halt. Yet we can only hope that they learn their efforts are futile and uncalled for. They shouldn’t see it as a battle because in the end we are the ones adding the zeros to their bank accounts in some way or another- when we tell a friend about a good song and that they in turn end up going to a live concert or we take a date to a movie and purchase not 1 but 2 tickets. They’ll realize one day.
Anyway I would like to inquire about your macbooks ticker and how you obtained it. It’s a marvellous piece of artwork that give new meaning to an old classic. I saw it while browsing around. Can you please send to my email how to obtain a replica of yours?
June 25th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Sorry my spelling is horrible. That is ‘your macbook’s sticker’ (on the lid)
June 29th, 2006 at 9:03 am
I’ve invented a new gizmo– Eyeglasses that don’t let you see things that you’re not allowed to. They read Copyright barcodes and RFID labels, etc, and if your glasses don’t have the permission to see that object, the LCD filter darkens, and you can’t see.
The same thing with hearing aids-
Imagine! (cough)
May 30th, 2008 at 5:05 am
All good things come to an end ,