cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/36143769
By MEE staff Published date: 11 September 2025 22:49 BST
Ben & Jerry’s has started a public campaign to try to separate from its parent company so it can freely speak about the war in Gaza, racial justice, and other issues. Its parent company, Magnum, has refused to sell the iconic ice cream brand.
The war between the ice-cream giants comes as Ben & Jerry’s became part of the Magnum Ice Cream company on Tuesday and Unilever prepares to spin off Magnum into a separate public company, which includes brands such as Ben & Jerry’s, Walls and Cornetto, in mid-November.
Unilever probably owns all the copyrights on their flavors, and maybe on dinner other stuff like production processes.
Generally speaking, recipes can’t be copyrighted (the specific wording of a written recipe might be protected, but the general idea of combining certain ingredients in a specific way can’t)
The names of the flavors, branding, etc. can be (or trademarked, or various other IP terms)
And aspects of the production process might be covered by patents and such.
And of course non-competes and such could complicate things for the actual people involved
And how you acquire those recipes can be a factor, that could rub up against non-disclosure agreements, corporate espionage laws, etc. you may need to be able to say that you came up with it on your own independent of the original recipe or pieced it together from publicly available information.
But in general, if anyone wanted to start up an ice cream company selling exact duplicates of Ben & Jerry’s flavors,they could do that as long as they called them all something different
Jesse, WTF are you talking about?
They could trademark the flavor names and copyright the carton art, but they can’t copyright the recipes themselves.
They’ll try, and our current crop of government would allow it
No, this is just stupid
I think, in certain cases, they can. IANAL, but I’m thinking about the formula for Coke or KFC’s 11 herbs and spices recipe. Aren’t those consider trade secrets? I mean they probably can’t protect “vanilla,” but they can trademark their specific formulation named something like “virgin snow vanilla?” I actually cringed a bit writing that…
edit: spelling
Okay, yeah, if Ben and Jerry (the people) have signed non-disclosure agreements preventing them from using their knowledge of the recipes at another company, that could indeed be an issue.
But what threw me off reading your comment is that trade secrets have absolutely fuck-all to do with copyright.
RMS has a good explainer about how trying to glom the unrelated concepts of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets together as “intellectual property” is actively harmful loaded language, and falling for it results in the kind of cognitive bias and misunderstanding that you just exhibited. It’s more important than you probably yet appreciate that you make an effort to keep those concepts separate in your mind and talk about them with precision.
His overall point seems to be that, because intellectual property consists of several things with distinctions among them, the use of a categorical term is incorrect. This seems flawed, as all categories are defined as such. The only problem OP has here is a lack of familiarity with those individual components, i.e. to know that trade secret is different than copyright/trademark. I don’t see how getting rid of the term IP would help to educate people on those differences.
It’s right there in the name, trade SECRETS.
Those are kept safe by legal agreements compelling secrecy, not letting most people know the secrets and other methods, but, if the secrets got out, the person who leaked it might get in trouble for breaking a legal contract or breaking and entering or whatever, but, the rest of the world would be able to legally sell things made using those recipes, but they probably wouldn’t be able to reference the original company directly (ie, Crowns Chicken, now using KFCs original recipe!) … “11 herbs and spices” is probably a term that’s trademarked too, but I’m sure some marketing person would find a creative way to tell everyone.
“IANAL” probably stands for something but I’m going to just read as if you like it in the tushie.
Hah. It’s I am not a lawyer.
Still a hilariously bad acronym 😂