I would like to live in a world where carpenters make their money by building things, filmmakers make money by producing movies and kitchens make money by preparing food. Unfortunately this is not the case.
Kern’s Kitchen owns the copyright to “Derby Pie,” meaning they and only they control the rights to produce that specific pie, and only they can refer to their creation as such. If you manage to create a strikingly similar (read: exact) pie in your home or restaurant, you might well be infringing on their legal rights.
Chef Rick Paul found this out this week. Kern’s Kitchen sent a private investigator into his Frankfort restaurant to catch Paul in the nefarious and outrageous act of selling food to customers. The nerve.
Kern’s has promptly gotten the courts involved, a practice they are not at all shy about employing. Having pacified Iraq, stopped global terrorism, bolstered the economy, achieved energy independence and made our public schools the envy of the world, the government now has plenty of resources for pie-gate.
Over the years, Cox said Kern’s has probably filed 25 lawsuits, “and we have prevailed on every single one. We tend to get larger settlements when it’s a second offense.”
At first, “we put people on notice and ask them to sign a letter agreeing not to infringe,” Cox said. “When they sign the letter, we keep a record. The next time, we sue them.”
Kern’s biggest cash award in a court case “has probably been $25,000 or $30,000,” Cox said.
Thus says the Frankfort State-Journal. Kern’s Kitchen isn’t the only one pouring money into litigation as opposed to gastronomy. If you hold a raffle for a big screen TV to watch the NFL’s well known championship game, you better not refer to it as the Super-you-know-what. That name’s copyrighted. The NFL can and will ask you to stop. The same applies to the large college basketball tournament commonly held in the third month of the year.
So if anyone needs me, I will be in my kitchen trying out pie recipes and thinking of popular-sounding names for them. I’m thinking of some kind of lemon custard thing with a light egg foam on top, but nothing is solid yet. I could make a fortune charging other people for the right to sell it…
In the meantime, I will let Chef Paul have the last word, since he usually does anyway:
“I think they probably would be better served going after some of these people on the Internet that are advertising Derby Pie as their own recipe, every day.”
