They’re trying to put Instagram out of business?
I watched a family of four sit down to plates of pretty standard fish and chips and veggies, and they all ceremoniously took out their phones and clicked away.
I’m not objecting. You all have the right to do weird things, in fact I encourage it. But it did make me smile.
You own the food, but the design is the chefs. You can’t present the design for your own benefit.
Which of course is a strange position to take–no flashes, no disruptions, no broken phones, no interrupting waiters, sure! Restaurants live and die by efficiency.
But a non intrusive photo is free advertising just like taking a photos of Times Square.
So it seems like the wrong problem is being tackled. If you can’t take a photo of your food without annoying other diners, then your food photoing privileges are gone, because you are disruptive.
(Obviously the colloquial You, not You You >:D)
Oh sure.
Taking a combative attitude with your customers is a great way to make them not come back.
yes, please remember to return it later.
You are definitely free to take photographs after you have eaten it, then post the picture to a restaurant review.
That would certainly be covered under the “remix” portion of the Creative Commons license.
It’s probably fair use too. 
So they just own the one arrangement? Or they can prevent any other chef from making a similar arrangement? (i’m assuming the former, but if it were the USA I’d expect the latter)
That would be a derivative work, so would need to meet fair-use guidelines.
If you’re gonna get meta… https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/35034/research-on-the-effectiveness-of-subtle-animation-to-draw-attention
In the US context, at least, the chief could presumably get around ‘work for hire’ by simply structuring it such that the design of the dish is his/the restaurant’s and you are simply purchasing a copy that happens to be manufactured on-demand rather than ahead of time.
As much as I think that this case is silly, it seems like it would be really perverse if, say, selling you a CD from a batch of 10,000 I produced ahead of time would just be selling a copy; but burning the CD when you made your purchase would make it a ‘work for hire’.
If you were to hire a caterer to put together some dish as a centerpiece for your party or something, you could presumably have a work for hire, if so agreed.
It isn’t really specific to this case; but the general trend with ‘intellectual property’ seems to be to extend it in so many intricate flavors and directions that, in the end, every ‘right’ will be ‘protected’; but none will actually be possible to exercise because you’ll need the clearance of so many different parties to do anything. We see this in limited form in the hell that is ‘rights clearance’ for a movie or similar production; but the way the laws are being written and interpreted there appears to be no reason to expect the disaster not to spread into just about any location where somebody thinks that it’s worth the time to put a threat on legal letterhead.
It’s worse than that: unless you are scrupulously careful to avoid incorporating any elements of the food into your body; you become both the author of an unauthorized derivative work and an unauthorized derivative work yourself.
Being sued for infringement and then seized and destroyed really ruins your day.
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