How To Support Your Favorite Food Bloggers:
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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 so much for this information. I had no ideal about this and I am wondering or I should say have a question. If i post a recipe say on Pinterest that I pinned from a cooking site or even a friends Pinterest that she liked and wanted to pin it so I would have the recipe easy to find am I doing something wrong. I don’t want to do anything wrong and I am so new to all of this and honestly I don’t understand it all just yet. I usually try to post if I know the cooking site’s name I will say something like I got this from such and such but I don’t use a link, I give credit to that site, is that okay to do? Sorry, so many questions but I do not want to take away from somebody or do something that is wrong. If you can help me with these questions I would appreciate it or at least give me some ideals about sites like Pinterest. Thank you!
Hey Pam! Don’t you worry one bit, I’m happy to answer any questions you have! First of all, if you’re worried about doing something wrong, I want to let you know that you are not the type of person who is causing problems 🙂
When you Pin a recipe, the best thing to do (in order to help support the site it came from) is pin just the photo. Most blogs have a “pin this” button up at the top or bottom of the post that allows you to do that. That way, whenever you want the recipe, all you have to do is click on the photo and it takes you right to the post.
BUT, if I didn’t make sense (I’m kinda sleep deprived right now) or if you have more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask so I can clarify. When you share recipes this way (by pinning the pictures or sharing the link on facebook), it actually helps the blog. When the full recipe is shared, folks have no reason to go to the blog that shared it so it hurts them rather than helps.
Gratefully,
Christy
Thanks Christy, for the information. When I share a recipe with family and friends I always say where I got it, always. And then I tell them to go on Amazon and buy your book! Which some have done. (my book was a gift from my daughter who lives in Austin TX and she got your signature to make it extra special. And it is VERY loved and used, lol, spots and spaters over it. I do wipe them off of course.) Thanks for all of your time and energy. I know it is very much appreciated.
Thank you for posting this Christy. I am a “small” blog compared to your’s, but with all of the horror stories I’ve heard out there regarding this subject, it’s scary to think what could happen as my blog grows. I shared your post on my blog, as well as my facebook page. I’d love if you added my blog to the above list.
April
Good article. I saw Dianne (Will Write for Food) share it on Facebook and arrived here. I had been wondering the same why some people don’t give credit when copying pictures. They’d even take the pains to crop the original watermark out. And especially wondering – why are some food bloggers ashamed (?) to share the sources the got their recipe from. Surely everyone gets inspired in some way; the recipes and proportions don’t just appear in a dream…
Hi, Christy! I just finished reading every word of each of the above comments. Very informative-but I’m still confused! I’m new to your site-and so enjoy your “words of wisdom” and your recipes. THANK YOU for them. The four-leaf clover article really turned around an otherwise not-so-nice day…Fond memories as a kid of searching for and delight in finding one of them…
A few months ago I joined Key Ingredient and have so enjoying gathering and saving recipes “all in one spot”. I do save your recipes to Ziplist, but then there’s two places. Am I allowed-or NOT- to save one of your recipes to Key Ingredient as long as the source (your site) is revealed? When you’re not “twenty-something” it’s hard to grasp some of this! I want to do the right thing. Thank You, Christy!
Hi Christy, sorry people are doing things like this. I do copy and paste some of your recipes into word documents but I put a little note at the bottom that it is a Christy Jordan recipe. Now I also copy recipes off of different facebook sites but most of them don’t say who is responsible for the recipe. I have noticed that many of the different pages have the same exact thing on them and I don’t know if they get them from Pinterest or steal from each others pages. If so that just isn’t right. If I could figure out who was stealing I would unlike their page but usually am not able to do so. By the way I never copy your pictures only the recipe so i can print it out and use it in the kitchen. I don’t use a laptop and the computer isn’t in the kitchen. Thanks for all you do your blog is great.
Thanks for the link at the end of the article, Christy. Just linked to your post on my Facebook fan page.