Creating a charity cookbook, is it legal?

My son is taking a trip through the Student Amabassador program and needs to raise 1/2 the trip money (roughly $2300). We thought we would do a local cookbook made up of friends and relatives recipes (with their written permission to print the recipes), have them printed at the local printing company (by their donation of labor) and then sell them locally. Do we need to self publish the book before selling to the public or can we print and sell?





We also thought about selling them on ebay (we need to contact them first to see if this is possible), but before we even begin transfering recipes to form, I wanted to know if anyone could see any legal action that could be taken against us by creating a cookbook and selling it for a State guided Student Ambassador program, the program is not related to a school system student exchange but many kids from one state travel together. This would not be for self profit, all proceeds would go straight to his trip funding.Creating a charity cookbook, is it legal?
Sure it is legal, but recipes are subject to copyright. that means you need at least the following from each person regarding each recipe:





1 - Assignment of the copyright to you if it belongs to them


2 - Indemnity from them if they don't won the copyright or are not sure





I am sure you can find the appropriate forms cheap from some books at nolo.com.





You might want to at least take a first pass at verifying the copyrights by entering some key phrases of the recipes into a search engine - there are lots of large and small recipe sites on line.Creating a charity cookbook, is it legal?
Answer: SimplyWords, poetry and prose has published the work of writers for 16 years with just a letter granting permission to use...As for raising $2300.


You better have a slew of friends and relatives that will pay to buy their own recipes.


That said...good luck and best wishes.
Churches make these type of items all the time - and I haven't heard of them running into legal issues.





A legal issue that could arise is if a recipe is not original or is already published in a known cookbook.





Not sure how many cookbook editors will be reading your little book looking for their ';copyrighted'; recipes though.