Much Ado over Small Potatos

So a food blogger over at Blogspot  basically got jumped by the people at America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country over a Potato Salad recipe that she had taken and made modified to her personal tastes.  She credited their original recipe as the inspiration for her much altered adaption.  She was emailed by someone in the PR office ordering her to take the "unauthorized posting of THEIR copyrighted material off her blog" and telling her that "THEIR copyrighted material could not be altered because it was perfect, with many of their recipes being tested over 100 times."

Um, Gigawhat???  Seriously?  First of all, you can not copyright ingredient lists, particularly not for common foods (i.e. American potato salad).  Second, you can't really copyright standard instructions without some sort of literary/stylistic element to them, such as "heating the over to 350 degrees always reminds me of helping my grandma bake pies in an old wood burning stove when I was little....".  Not sure how many of you have read an ATK recipe, but there isn't a lot of flowery language involved.  I am all for authors of original work getting their due, but seriously??

I had actually be considering purchasing their cook book/DVD set to better support PBS.  Um, yeah, not so much.  Already, this has landed on at least three food blogs I read, but I thought I would share it with the wider, not necessarily foodie world.