Yep. The news has hit the WORLD. Scalzi and Neil Gaimanon Twitter, for starters, plus Boing Boingand Reddit.
FB is collecting a whole mess of similarly stolen recipes, including from the Food Network and NPR. And Paula Deen has lawyered up.
Some days, schadenfreude is awesome.
Beauteous. My only regret is that I can’t follow the actual drama on FB from work.
Disclaimer: the following is not an official statement from the USPTO.
Or a specific design. The tread on a Michelin XGV, for example.
Further reading: Apparently one of the recipes was lifted from Recipes Today, which is owned by Disney, which is not known for retaining a kind and generous lawyerly cadre.
Plus, that Paula Deen recipe was also published in dead tree format, so it’s not just Deen herself, it’s also the publisher’s lawyers. And I took a closer look at the Deen example, and it’s a word for word ripoff from start to end, not just the ingredients list.
Bye bye, Cooks Source.
Hah! I just Googled them since I hadn’t heard of them before, and the first hit is a Washington Post article on the hubbub. The title includes the phrase, “how to annoy the Internet.”
You get Food Network, NPR, and Disney pissed at you? Better pray.
Edit: The article includes comments that Martha Stewart, Weight Watchers, and WebMD were plagiarized from as well, and that thus may have been happening over the last few decades.
As a published writer this crappy behavior unfortunately does not surprise me. I routinely run into people who steal my articles from the web without attribution. The last person who did it required three emails before he finally agreed to stop. He then offered me more writing work – at a penny a word. He’s a plumber. I wrote him back asking if would come over and fix my drains for five bucks. Shockingly he had no comment about my generous offer.
Wow. That editor’s response is one of the stupidest, most irresponsible things I’ve read from an editor. She obviously does not know copyright law if she thinks anything on the Internet is “public domain.” (This is assuming, from what I understand, that the recipe and exact wording were lifted wholesale from the Gode Cookery website, which seems to be the case.)
The Smithsonian Magazine once, through an honest error, used two of my photos that I posted on a local food message board in an online article of theirs–not even their print version. I sent them a polite letter asking them to take it down or, if they’d like web usage rights, that I’d be willing to sell it to them for $400. To my surprise, they actually paid me the four hundred bucks.
So, death pool on when the website gets unplugged? I’ll say Dec 9 (3 days for certified letters, plus 30 days to cease & desist).
Not true.
Patents and copyrights are protected exclusively by federal law.
Trademarks are protected by both federal and state law.
Trade secrets are protected exclusively under state law. Most states have enacted some version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
The Cooks Source site is down.
Wow, that was fast 
(I know, I know, “down” doesn’t mean “out”)
A more likely case, I think, is that she thinks that Ms Gaudino, having published on the web, not through a dead tree publisher, is ignorant of the laws, and can be convinced by such lies.
It’s back up again.
I’ve never seen an online “discussion” move so fast. I posted to it and within 2 minutes my post was off the bottom of the second page.
Well she has repsonded on Facebook:
Reprinted without persmission
Well, shit, people here argue that it’s OK to illegally download music… I’m interested in seeing how they spin this one. 
(He sez before reading the rest of the thread…)
Well, she did say that she had many who write for her for free.
It’s just that they didn’t know about it.
Wow.
How does this woman still have a job?
I highly doubt you’ll find anyone on this forum who legitimately claims that it’s okay to download someone else’s music, claim it as your own, and sell it to other people.
Is Monica still pursuing this? I really hope so.