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! I have seen a lot of this going on with food bloggers’ beautiful pictures that accompany their amazing recipes, such as yours. I shared this post on my blog, changing the url. There have been comments saying this has been happening to others, not just food bloggers. Here is the link to my post. 🙂 http://www.recipesformyboys.com/2013/04/how-you-can-help-support-your-favorite.html
OK, so as a fellow blogger, there’s a few things that can be done here. First, the DMCA notices are simply empty threats unless you intend to file a lawsuit. Send them on, but there are easier ways to set things up.
On a technical level, most places use a ‘scraping’ program, which works automagically in getting your pictures and recipes. There’s rarely a human that’s copying and pasting (and that’s a different animal to tangle with). This ‘dumb’ scraper scoops up a blog post and pictures from your RSS feed.
Two things here, and both assume you’re on a self-hosted WordPress site. When we’re done, your photos will have a watermark, and sites that steal your stuff will be sending links back to you.
Geek level: 2.5 out of 10
Time required: about 5-10 minutes
Step 0: download and install a free plugin called ‘Watermark Reloaded’. This plugin automatically overlays a watermark over every picture you upload. This can be as small or as big as you like, any text you want, and any color. Now your photos are safe.
Step 1: From your WordPress backend, click Settings > “For each article in a feed, show” – click the button for “Summary”. In other words, the RSS feed (where the bots are getting your post) will show a snippet of your post, not the full post.
Step 2: Install a plugin called “WordPress SEO” by a company called YOAST (http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo). There are several others that will add a message to your RSS feed, but this one incorporates a lot of features into one free package.
Step 3: After installing and activating the plug-in, a new sidebar item on the left called “SEO’ should appear. Hover over SEO, then click RSS. By default, the second text box down (“Content to put after each post:”) should already have the codes to create two links after each RSS feed item. You could add a link to anywhere you like, but the default is exactly what we need.
Step 4: Enjoy having other websites send you links! They’ve gone from stealing your posts to marketing your posts for you.
Oh my goodness, thank you so much for all of this information Chris!!! You have answered several questions I had and gave me lots of information that I needed!!!!!
While I am sorry you had to write about this, your article is fabulous and so true! I posted about it, linking to southernplate.com and this specific post on my blog http://farmquilter.blogspot.com/ Thank you for all you do for all of us!!!
Thank you very much for your post, I am so sorry to hear you and others have to go through all of this. I just started my own blog and have had second thoughts about finishing it with all that people go through. There is so much to learn and to worry about people stealing just does not seem worth it. I love your postings, recipes and learning about your family and all the love you share, I will continue to enjoy your posts. God Bless 🙂
It’s sad and a shame that people are stealing your hard work. If I discover that someone has stolen someone else’s content, I would post something on the thief’s site crediting who *truly* originated the information.
Keep up your excellent work. I always enjoy reading it. There’s love in your posts and recipes.
Right before Christmas I found a blog that had stolen my content and published it as her own. She even put HER watermark on MY photo, so I know it was deliberate. I contacted the legal department of her webhost and she took it down, along with all the other craft projects she had posted (which I’m guessing she also used illegally). It was very upsetting! There really isn’t any way to keep people from stealing content, but I do watermark my photos now.
People want all the Glory and none of the effort to get something these days. It is a shame people are so sorry or lazy to do something them self. I love your blog. Is this correct when we click on your ads on your page you get something for it to help pay for the site? I do not always check out all of the ads but if this is the case I will make sure I do from now on. We want your site to continue for years.