Most of us don’t seriously consider the provenance of recipes when aimlessly watching food-porn videos on Facebook, but the world of delicately crafted baked goods is the subject of some new legal drama. As The Hollywood Reporter reports, Elizabeth LaBau of the blog SugarHero has deemed the Food Network a sugar villain, suing the company for allegedly copying a video recipe she did for “snow globe cupcakes with gelatin bubbles.” The cupcakes themselves are pretty mundane–what’s really at stake here are LaBau‘s detailed instructions for how to create the “bubbles” using gelatin sheets and water balloons, a useful tip those that really want to show off during the holiday season.
According to the suit, the recipe was originally published in 2014 and went ”viral” the following year, bringing in traffic and money for LaBau’s site. In December 2016 she debuted a filmed demonstration, and discovered the similar Food Network video a few weeks later. The complaint alleges that Food Network “copied numerous copyrightable elements of Plaintiff’s work precisely, including but not limited to choices of shots, camera angles, colors, and lighting, textual descriptors, and other artistic and expressive elements of Plaintiff’s work.” It argues that, in turn, LaBau ”suffered severe losses” and ”caused [her] severe distress.”