How To Support Your Favorite Food Bloggers:
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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.
Christy, I read this same post on SouthernBite yesterday. So who “stole” it from whom? LOL
Actually I found your site through Stacey, and I know you are friends. As I told him yesterday, those pages are fairly easy to spot on Facebook. (People who post four or five recipes a day. Photos that are taken by many different people. Recipes that appear in the message as opposed to going to a link.) As soon as I realize what is going on, I no longer go to those pages, and I “unfriend” if I have been previously duped.
Good luck with this. Stealing is stealing, and I don’t want to support it,
I shared this a few days ago and gave bloggers full permission to use it because I fretted over the language for two days and knew it would be easier for other bloggers going through this to just copy and paste rather than have to write it from scratch 🙂
Margy, you are awesome! thank you SO MUCH for supporting us!
Right now the “followers” of one of those pages is harassing and threatening the person who does emilybites.com. Wish there was something that could be done about those types of pages.
Christy, what an informative post. I am not a blogger, but I am a big reader of blogs…especially cooking blogs. I was not aware that this theft was such a huge problem. Good for you for bringing it to the attention of your readers. Y’all need to “circle the wagons” and take care of the bad guys.
Love , love, love your recipes and especially your stories. Your beautiful spirit shines through every post. Thank you.
Christy-
Thank you so much for this! So many readers are confused as to what they can do and want to make sure they are doing it right and this post really helps clarify the issue. I have shared it with my facebook community.
Thanks,
Cris
Thank YOU Cris! So glad I could be of a small help. So many bloggers from around the web are banding together, especially with the vicious attacks they’re receiving for reporting the theft. Hoping we can help the well meaning folks to know what to stay away from!
Gratefully,
Christy
Thank you for this terrific article and thank you for your fantastic website!
Thank YOU Rebekah!
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.