Sooner or later almost every food blogger finds her work being published somewhere else without her permission. This can be mildly annoying to downright infuriating. Sometimes people copying your work are just beginning bloggers who don’t know any better. But often enough they really are people trying to get something for nothing.  In the last year I’ve twice seen the entire contents of my site published on someone else’s blog with them taking full credit for my work. Here are some things to keep in mind if copyright infringement happens to you and what you can do about it.

1.  Know your rights.

The U.S. Copyright Law is online for all to see; in particular read Chapter 1, section 102, the “subject matter of copyright”. If you are a food blogger, you are likely blogging about recipes.  Recipes are considered “methods” or “procedures” and are not covered under the scope of copyright law unless the expression of which constitutes “substantial literary expression”.

A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection (https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html )

Basic recipe instructions are not covered by copyright because they are considered methods.  However, the law does protect your photographs of food, and your headnotes or accompanying stories. It also protects “collections” of recipes, as a collection.  Note that there is a clause for “fair use” which allows people to copy parts of your work for the purpose of criticism, comment, or scholarly research. (Chapter 1, Section 107)

It is important to know what rights you actually have, because if you attempt to pursue someone for infringement of a right that you don’t have, you could be liable for tens of thousands of dollars in damages. (See “Infringement Notification” section of http://www.google.com/dmca.html.)

Note that a Creative Commons License is NOT the same thing as copyright. Copyright is the more restrictive, in other words, it’s the strongest license to have when it comes to you keeping your rights. Having a Creative Commons license is a way to give away some of these rights to make it easier for others to create derivative works, or for non-commercial enterprises to use your work.  Your protectable works are protected by US Copyright law by default. You do not have to label them or register them to be protected by copyright law.  If you claim a Creative Commons license, however, your rights are now more limited than they would be by Copyright alone.

2. Take preventative measures.

Do you publish a full feed? If so, you’re asking for trouble. There are hundreds of feed aggregators out there packaging together feeds from blogs. Some of these aggregators are legit, and providing a useful service for those wanting to see similar content from many sites all on one page. Some of the aggregators are just trying to piggyback on the success of others by republishing a feed and slapping some Adsense code on it. If you publish a full feed, you make it extremely easy for others to programmatically republish your work onto their site. You will end up spending a lot of time tracking these folks down and asking them to remove your work.

My recommendation is to publish a partial feed, with a “Continue reading” link in the feed itself.  If the “continue reading” link also includes the title of your post, then the aggregators are actually doing you a favor by republishing your content.  They are giving you an inbound link with your blog post title (hopefully that includes keywords), which can only help you in Google rankings.  A link back to your source page ensures that you will not get dinged by Google for duplicate content, and the link with your title in the anchor text increases your search engine rank for the the text of the link.

Some bloggers watermark their photos to dissuade others from republishing them.  If you consider yourself a professional photographer, this may be in your best interest.  Otherwise it may just not be worth the effort, given that watermarks typically detract from the aesthetics of the photo, so they end up diminishing the experience of your readers, and most people who take photos tend to strip out the copyright notices or ignore them altogether.  As long as a photo of mine is published with a link to the source recipe on my site, and doesn’t actually include the recipe itself, I consider the photos a great way to market the content on my site, and I usually don’t care if they are republished elsewhere.

3.  Find the thieves.

In order to stop the copyright theft, you have to catch them first.  One way to do this is to set up a Google Alert with your blog name as the search term.  Google will send you an email every time your blog is mentioned on the web.  If you happen to mention the name of your blog in your blog post, or if it is in a link in the post, and the post is republished somewhere, Google will likely find it and notify you. Checking to see what blogs are linking to you can reveal the scam blogs too. Use the Copyscape service to check to see if any of your pages are being copied elsewhere on the Internet.

4.  Contact the blog owner.

Okay, so you’ve found someone copying your content without your permission.  If this is a fellow blogger, perhaps someone who is obviously new to blogging, the best way to to about it is to gently request that they not publish your work on their site.  Usually new bloggers are enthusiastic about something they’ve found on your site and certainly don’t want to do something that upsets you.  The approach I take is to leave a comment on the problem post to the effect of,

I’m delighted that you like my recipe enough to blog about it on your own site.  I would ask however, that if you are writing about my recipe that you write it in your own words, that you include a link back to the source recipe on my site, and that you do not also publish the photo and the headnotes.  Thank you so much for your consideration.

If the site is clearly a commercial site, copying your work and probably the works of others, without their own content, or misrepresenting your work as their own, then a private email or a comment with a stronger tone is appropriate.

I’ve noticed that you’ve copied works from my site ABC Food Blog and republished them on your site without my permission.  Please remove all content that you’ve copied from my site within the next 12 hours or I will file a DMCA complaint against you with your web host.  (Or a DMCA complaint with Google Adsense, if they are using Google Adsense and you can’t figure out who their web host is.)

5.  Find out who their web host is.

There are various ways to find out who is hosting a website.  One way is to look up the domain in WHOIS.  Sometimes this information is kept private on the Whois directory though.  A more consistent method is to look up their IP address.  First put look up the IP address of the domain in the Hostname to IP Address Lookup.  Then copy the resulting IP address into the IP Lookup.  The results should tell you the ISP who is hosting the site, and the city, state, and country of origin.  If the web host is in the US, it should be easy to file a complaint.

6.  File a complaint.

Go to the website of the web host (look it up in Google).  Look for w here on the site you can file a DMCA complaint.  Usually this is abuse@webhost.com, or sometimes legal@webhost.com.  If the web host is legitimate, and most are, there are usually posted guidelines for submitting DMCA complaints.  You will likely have to send them an email in a specific form, claiming that you are the copyright holder, and you will need to list in detail the specific URLs and the contents on those pages that are infringing on your copyright.
Your email to the webhost should follow this structure:

Dear Webhost,

I am writing to file a complaint of copyright infringement against a website hosted on your servers.  The infringing website is _______________________.

The infringing content is ___________________ (Photos, introductory notes, recipe collection, etc. Remember that recipes themselves are not usually protectable, but the specifically worded personalized text may be, and collections are protectable.)
The infringing content is located at these URLs on the infringing website: _____________________

The source content can be found on my website here: ____________________

Please remove this infringing content from your servers.

Finish with the following text (required):

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.  I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Sign the the email with your name, email address, postal address, and phone number (necessary for official complaint, though sometimes I leave out the postal address and phone number and it still works).

In my experience, the turnaround time for abuse complaints filed with web hosts is much faster than filing with Google, within 24 hours usually.

If the offending blog is hosted on Blogspot or Blogger, you can now file a complaint online at http://support.google.com/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_dmca&dmca=image&product=blogger

Blogger’s copyright policy can be found here.

7.  If the site uses Google Adsense, you can file a complaint with Google.

If the web host is not findable, or not responsive, and the offending site is showing Google Adsense ads, you can file a DMCA complaint with Google Adsense. Adsense now has an online DMCA complaint form to expedite complaints. If the site is not using Google Adsense, but some other ad network, you may be able to file a complaint with the other ad network.

8.  Keep a look-out for your friends.

See a site copying a fellow food blogger’s works? Let them know! Half the time I find out about sites from other food bloggers emailing me. The more we can watch each other’s backs, the stronger a force we will be in protecting all of our works.

Other ideas I haven’t mentioned here?  Please let us know about them in the comments.

Links:

How to file a copyright infringement claim in Blogger
How to report a copyright violation in Facebook
How to file a complaint with WordPress.com
How to file a copyright complaint with Pinterest
How to file a DMCA complaint with Yahoo Answers
How to file a DMCA complaint with eBay
How to file a copyright or trademark violation in Instagram
How to report copyright infringement on Amazon
A Guide to Copyright and Creative Commons
Godaddy Trademark and Copyright Infringement Policy
How to request that Google remove content from its search index because the content is infringing on your copyrights
How to get content removed from the Google search engine