How To Support Your Favorite Food Bloggers:
If you see a facebook group or website that posts my photos and writing onto his or her page instead of linking to SouthernPlate.com directly, they are in violation of both the Federal DMCA Act and Copyright Law.
The reason why this is bad is because it costs a great deal of money to operate SouthernPlate.com and other websites where content is illegally taken from, my server bill alone is more than most people’s mortgage payment each month. When people take content that others have written and developed and put it on their sites, it makes it harder for those offering the content to pay the light bill, for services that they provide free of charge to you.
Hours, sometimes days, are put into creating one post, that all the offender’s do is copy and paste in order to drive traffic to and promote their site and/or facebook page. Once our content is stolen, we are also penalized for having duplicate content on the internet, and our recipes receive lower priority in search engines as well.
Often when this happens, it isn’t meant as a violation of a federal law and is just someone who wants to share a recipe that they really liked. But sometimes, this is done by people and even companies who repeatedly copy and paste content from those who have worked hard to develop it, willingly and knowingly.
Often, these people say “You can’t copyright recipes”. While you can’t copyright a random list of ingredients, our writing (descriptions, introductions, instructions, etc) and photographs are copyrighted – and each post represents hours of work that these folks steal in under a minute and use as a platform to build their sites on.
However, just about everyone reading this who shares recipes do so with no malicious intent, and bloggers realize that. This is intended for those who willingly violate federal law despite having received complaints, and having been reported, by knowingly and repeatedly stealing content from sites to place on their own.
If you see a site or facebook page with repeated complaints, a blogger who has to build new sites because their old ones are taken down, these are clues that such sites and pages are being run by repeat offenders who fully understand that what they are doing is illegal. A lot of people don’t realize that the websites we enjoy free of charge cost a great deal of money to operate. These sites and pages that run primarily off of stealing content from other sites take all food bloggers one step closer to not being able to afford to continue.
It’s easy for us to share a recipe. While photos are copyrighted, all of the bloggers I know welcome sharing photos as long as a link to the recipe is given to the recipe rather than the entire recipe reposted.
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See my examples of how to legally share a recipe and photo below:
I love Stacey Little’s Sweet Cornbread Muffins! Here is a link if y’all wanna check out the recipe! http://southernbite.com/2013/01/09/sweet-cornbread-muffins/
Made this Stuffed French Toast last night. You have to try it. So easy! Here is where I found the recipe! https://www.southernplate.com/2012/02/overnight-stuffed-french-toast.html
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Thank you so much for helping all of the bloggers who provide free sites around the web for all of us to enjoy and special thanks to all of the Southern Plate Family members who have emailed and messaged me to make me aware of this growing problem. Without all of you, there wouldn’t be a Southern Plate!
*If you are a food blogger who would like to repost the above statement, changing out your url for SouthernPlate.com, please feel free to do so. Let me know in the comments if you have and I’ll be happy to add a link to your blog below so that others can enjoy you recipes, too! Thank you!
Special thanks to the following friends from the blog world for all of their hard work and dedication in helping educate folks around the web on content theft. Please leave a comment below if you would like to add this to your blog (it’s not required though!) so I can add your link to this list.
The post it place
pinchofthissmidgeonofthat.blogspot.com
FoodiewithFamily.com
LarksCountryHeart.com
CallMepmc.com
bobbiskozykitchen.blogspot.com
theCountryCook.net
Cooking with K
MommysKitchen.net
Mumsie’s Gourmet
Good Food Gourmet
Sweet Tea with Cindy
SouthernBite.com
Simple Fare, Fairly Simple
South Your Mouth
Basil Momma
Goodness Gracious
The Cozy Little Kitchen
Syrup and Biscuits
Grammas in the Kitchen
For a great article explaining a little more about the abuse food bloggers are dealing with right now, please click here.
Thank you for this information! Yes it’s really been a problem for me, even with my smaller blog. I take pride in what I do on my blog, and we put lots of time, energy and love into all our photos and recipes!! Thanks again. 🙂
Blessings,
Leslie
Exactly. We spend hours, days, weeks, and in a few minutes they take it and post it as their own. Food blogs are so enjoyable and such a great community but if this persists, they won’t be able to support themselves and the well of content to steal from will eventually run dry.
The worst part is the vicious attacks from the folks who steal content once they’re reported. This has definitely gotten criminal and some of the sweetest people are receiving very severe threats from folks with thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands) of followers on Facebook.
it is such a shame that this is happening. Thank you for sharing this info with us.
I agree with us knowing who is stealing your content then we can ensure that we dont go to their site. Their should be a published “avoid” list. thank you for all that you do and the others who are legitimately making a difference.
Hi Debby! Maybe there is one, I’ll look around. The problem is that once a blogger reports one of these pages, the page owners retaliate. They have their followers threaten them, report THEIR site to facebook and blog platforms (The Country Cook actually lost her facebook page for a few days because once she reported content theft, the violator reported all of her photos as stolen and facebook had to investigate- the realized she legally owned them but did not shut down the page who falsely reported). Hundreds of threatening emails come in, threatening comments on our sites, and harassment from all angles. These people doing this are not nice folks. They play innocent in public but dirty behind the scenes and they have no intention of stopping.
I would love an “AVOID” list. That probably can’t happen, but it would be nice.
Just curiously, does re-pining a Pin of one of your recipes also violate the Federal DMCA act? And do your sponsors and giveaways offset your server bill? Do you have any of the websites or Facebook sites that upload any of your recipes or photos without giving credit? Because I’d certainly like to see an example of someone who might be stealing one of your ideas without credit. That would be unfair indeed.
Repinning is a wonderful thing. Pinterest has really gone to great lengths with their system and a pinned picture brings you right back to the original location of it in just a few clicks. This really isn’t about folks who pin recipes, share on facebook (using the share button or link), etc. This is about people who absolutely take content and pass it off as their own. There are countless facebook sharing sites that have my content on them right now. Just yesterday I found a page that copied and pasted one of my recipes, descriptions, and photo and said “This came from my Grandmother”.
As far as giveaways, they don’t offset any costs for me because I don’t charge to do them. A lot of bloggers do and I really should, but I don’t. I am a bad business person 🙂 I don’t really have sponsors except for maybe a few posts a year and that just adds a few drops to the bucket. I could get more sponsors but I prefer to be able to write on my own terms as often as possible. Ad revenue does help offset most months, but when your content is put onto other sites, it reduces the amount of people coming to your site and therefore the ads that folks click on are reduced – while the other sites they are on get the revenue that content would have generated for you. It sure is a whole lot easier and quicker to copy and paste than it is to do the work, I’m sure!
Thanks for asking Kathleen and I hope you are having a wonderful day today!
May I be added to the above list? Basilmomma.com
I had a picture and recipe recently taken and used on a page I won’t name here. The picture was of my son. We made a pie together. I asked to have it removed and the page owner refused saying she took the picture. I won’t go into what I emailed her as a response but after I reported her to Fb and my attorney contacted her she removed it.
I received threats from her ‘fans’ , lost followers and had some pretty rough days. And I’m just the tip of the iceberg!
Thank you for sharing this!
Great article Christy!
Thank you so much Caterina! It’s great to know you! I’ve added your links into the post above, too!
Thanks for info Christy. I don’t really understand how blogs work so I have a question. If you have a recipe posted I want to make, can I copy that to MS Word so I can print and take to the store? Also, I don’t want my laptop sitting on kitchen counter so I need a hardcopy. I posted a recipe on keyingredient.com and later saw my own picture on somebody else’s recipe. I didn’t like that….lol. I don’t have Facebook because I simply don’t have time and I don’t care for the drama that I hear people talk about. I do feel that I miss out if there is a giveaway on a blog and I have to enter via Facebook. Thanks,
Absolutely! Please do! The problem bloggers are having is with people stealing our content and posting it on facebook groups and websites as their own. You are the exact person we’re here for and I’m honored that you use recipes from SouthernPlate! Print away, save them, and please enjoy!
Neither of the links, in your “examples” above, actually work.
I didn’t make my examples clickable because I wasn’t doing this to drive traffic but you make a good point, those photos make me hungry and not everyone will know how to copy and paste a link. So per your suggestion, I’ve make them clickable now. Thanks! 🙂