In a piece called “Who Owns The Korean Taco” two experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property, Kal Raustiala (a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute) and Chris Sprigman (a professor at the University of Virginia Law School), take the whole phenomenon of Kogi and its copycats and use it as an academic exercise to answer this question:
“Why do chefs continue to invent new dishes when others are free to copy them?”
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Their well-reasoned arguments are a good read. Among the conclusions the two writers come up with is that “copying the Korean taco is not like copying the latest Lady Gaga download.”
“Cooking,” they write, “is a decidedly analog technology.”
Read the rest here.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.