First and foremost, you won’t find any recipes on this site because this site isn’t about sharing recipes. This site is about putting your foot down when someone blatantly copy & pastes YOUR hard work from your site onto their site, or worse, their shitty social media page/group.
After having multiple food blogs for the past 20 years, I became fed up with these “overnight” sites that blatantly copy and paste recipes & articles while lazily sourcing those recipes with a single 8-font size domain.com in italics at the bottom without so much as a link. Yet, they’d go out of there way to edit my photographs that I’d literally taken hours to create, in order to remove my watermark so they could display stolen content on their sites.
Secondly, some will argue that you cannot copyright a recipe, so you have no rights. While I am NOT an attorney, I have read the copyright laws and from my understanding and interpretation of the copyright law you can and do have the right to protect your recipes that you’ve shared on your site, despite what some will say, but there are a few basic guidelines that you must adhere to:
- Ingredients lists cannot be copyrighted.
- Basic Mixing terms cannot be copyrighted, such as “combine in a bowl, mix”.
- Your complete description, explanation or illustrations that accompany a recipe CAN be copyrighted.
- Only original works of authorship are protected by copyright, which means you must have produced your own intellectual effort.
Source: Government Copyright Office
This site is a Step by Step, do it yourself guide for stopping a site that is infringing on Your Hard Work.
Step 1. Once you have located a site that has been displaying YOUR content, immediately install an Ad Blocker in your browser BEFORE you return to that site.
Why? It may take you hours to determine just how much of your content has been used without your authorization and you may view hundreds of pages. Do you really want them to be earning income while you’re being forced to view page after page on their site to protect your own content? I think not!
Step 2. If you’re just reaching this step, you’ve just discovered that a site has been ripping your content for god knows how long. You probably have a hundred things running through your head, you might even be near tears wondering how anyone could be such a classless jerk.
Before you can continue to the next step, you have to figure out exactly how much of your material is being used without your consent. Here’s the Easiest Way to locate that information.
Step 3: Who are you dealing with? You’ll need to know who is behind the domain, this page explains how/where to find out important information such as who owns the site, who is hosting the site and how to get in contact with the owners directly.
Step 4: STOP THIEF! Send them a Cease and Desist Letter citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 OR a DMCA Takedown Notice.
Since this letter MUST contain key information in order for your request to be processed at all, please visit this page for complete details and of course, form letters that you can easily fill in with your own information.
Step 5: Tell the World! You’re probably not the first to get screwed over by this person, and unless you share what you’ve found, you probably won’t be the last either.