All information from cover to cover is protected by copyright by the Brewers Association.
The book is copyrighted, not the recipes. Recipes cannot be copyrighted.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.htmlIt doesn't really take that long to enter in a few grains, some hops, a yeast strain, mash temp and fermentation temp. If you compare entering a recipe into Beersmith versus the amount of time and effort it takes to brew a batch from start to finish, this should be no problem. It took over 8 years of brewing and research to put together BCS and chances are if all the recipes were floating around the internet there would be a lot of people in the future who would not buy the book despite the fact they are missing out on background info on the recipes.
As Jamil would say...."Here's the thing..." I do see your point and agree somewhat. The thing is, I bought the book. This is me compensating the authors for writing the book. If there was file pack with all the recipes, I'd pay for it but it doesn't exist, commercially anyway. If I was asking for a pdf of the book, that would be different. In this particular case, the recipes are not very helpful without the background and brew notes from the book.
Regarding entering the recipes into BS, it takes me 10-15 minutes per recipe. Considering that BS is clunky to use, has endless lists to scroll through and requires you to interpret much of the mash info from a recipe in a book to the software, it does take some time. My whole point is why do it manually when I can just download the recipes? Why do anything manually when you can do the same thing with the same result automatically?
Many (if not all) of these recipes are already out there on the net, just not in bsmx or bsm or xml format.
