Just because it's in the net doesn't mean it's free!

The BBQ Pit
21

I see I didn’t reply some of your questions.
[QUOTE=Una Persson]
Have you read the US Copyright office link? Some of us take the issue of copyright very seriously, and false claims of copyright are just as bad as piracy IMO. From what I can see from the examples you posted which I clicked on, there is no “substantial literary expression” as I understand qualifies for protection.
[/quote]
I have read it, in more than one ocassion. I have also researched before abuot this. Please tell me that this is just a coincidence:

[quoteWhy are you sure “that they cannot copy them verbatim” from your site? What is your legal basis for making threats to them? Have you retained a lawyer or are you coming up with your legal basis on your own?[/quote]
They can have as many gazillion recipes of sancocho as they wish, but the exact same recipe in my site, which was written by myself, in the exact same words, in the exact same order?

“However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions…”

I have not threatened them. I actually asked them very nicely. If they don’t remove them I will seek professional advice though.

And just to make it clear again: none of these recipes were contributions. They were all written by me from scratch. Our recipe section is independent from the forums, so is the article section: check our main site for an idea: www.dominicancooking.com. Nobody can post recipes in our recipe section, precisely to avoid that (and other issues).

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[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
“However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions…”
[/QUOTE]
I think Una is trying to get you to acknowledge the “substantial literary” part of that phrase; there’s certainly no doubt concerning the provenance of the very lightly edited text on that forum. I’m not a copyright expert, but I did spend a year working as a community mod on a huge user participation site, and a large part of my job was removing copyrighted material. I think (and without taking anything away from the effort you put in to your recipes) that it’s probably questionable whether the short paragraph descriptions accompanying your recipes would meet the above criteria. In most of your examples the users seem to have deleted or cropped the intro paragraphs, leaving only the ingredients and bare instructions, which as pointed out are quite probably not copyrightable.

Consider that fair use allows whole paragraphs of news articles to be reproduced verbatim without direct permission; essentially as much duplication as these people are doing. On the whole once alerted I probably would have taken down any posts like this, but I think the recipes are so brief that it’s really expecting quite a lot of a free bulletin board with an awful lot of sections to proactively google all submissions on the offchance of infringement. By the time I left my job I could spot a copied submission a mile off (mostly because the punctuation would be correct for a change), but to someone who didn’t write them themselves, it’s pretty hard to tell these from a genuine submission IMO.

Again, I completely understand your being pissed off, and think it’s pretty galling that these people are being so lazy and disrespectful, but I do think the illegality here is arguable at best. If there’s enough of an actual community at this forum could you perhaps try responding to the threads that have copied your work - try and ask them (semi-)nicely to stop doing it?

23

Are pictures not copyrighted? If so their site is full of pictures from other sites. Mine (see example in my post above) were definitely not used with my permission, and since they have my site URL is clear that the poster did not produce them.

My main point is they are a media conglomerate. They would come down on you like the wrath of Og if you so much as use any of their material, but their forums are no man’s land. Double standard at its worst.

24

The operative part in your OP was this:

When you said “our” I assumed that meant contributions from more than one person, not that you were using a “royal our”. I apologize for misunderstanding that. Clearly, if you wrote them and you created them, then you know the provenance of the recipes, so providing you didn’t copy them then that subject is off the table.

[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
Please tell me that this is just a coincidence:

They can have as many gazillion recipes of sancocho as they wish, but the exact same recipe in my site, which was written by myself, in the exact same words, in the exact same order?
[/QUOTE]

Oh, I don’t doubt that they copied it from your site. The question is, as Dead Badger correctly pointed out, the operative words “substantial literary expression”. My recollection is that that means that more than just simple instructions are required - to more correct, that a substantial narrative is involved.

This actually means absolutely nothing with respect to the law. It only means that they wanted to avoid any hint of copyright violation. Lawyers also have been known to make vague legal threats which are not backed by the law at all.

I think you might be in for a disappointment here when you do so. However, can I recommend a couple of things you can do to reduce the level of copying?

  1. Make an HTML page containing your recipes, with either the background colour you want, or with a pure-white background.

  2. Take a screenclip of the recipes, and cut and crop so that each recipe is a clear, sharp .GIF file (don’t use JPG due to roughness). You can make the GIFs transparent very easily such that they work with any background.

  3. Use these graphics in place of your recipes. Now you have done two things here:

a) You have made it such that they cannot do a selct-text-copy-and-paste effort. They will have to either re-type everything by hand, or else scan and OCR. And believe me, I doubt anyone will make the effort.

b) You’ve now turned a possibly-not-copyrightable recipe into an almost-certainly-copyrighted artwork.

I didn’t address the pictures they took, but my method above uses this to your advantage, should you choose to give it a try.

Please believe me - although I am disputing your copyright claim to an extent, I am on your side on this point 110%.

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[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
Are pictures not copyrighted? If so their site is full of pictures from other sites. Mine (see example in my post above) were definitely not used with my permission, and since they have my site URL is clear that the poster did not produce them.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, sorry; my brain completely ignored the picture. That’s a bit of a crowning turd on the annoyingness, isn’t it? I particularly like the way they’ve gone to all the effort of re-hosting your picture to perfectly recreate the whole thing. You’d think for that amount of work they could write their own (FUCKING) recipe, couldn’t they?

Una’s image idea is a good one, but a couple of issues come to mind: one, I’d be very wary of compromising your site’s usability for honest users just for the sake of spiting some lazy bastards (particularly since it’s very attractively designed, IMO); and two, providing a handy all-in-one image might actually making the copying process easier for said bastards, since they won’t have to worry about reformatting the recipes on their (astonishingly ugly) board.

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[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Yeah, sorry; my brain completely ignored the picture. That’s a bit of a crowning turd on the annoyingness, isn’t it? I particularly like the way they’ve gone to all the effort of re-hosting your picture to perfectly recreate the whole thing. You’d think for that amount of work they could write their own (FUCKING) recipe, couldn’t they?

Una’s image idea is a good one, but a couple of issues come to mind: one, I’d be very wary of compromising your site’s usability for honest users just for the sake of spiting some lazy bastards (particularly since it’s very attractively designed, IMO); and two, providing a handy all-in-one image might actually making the copying process easier for said bastards, since they won’t have to worry about reformatting the recipes on their (astonishingly ugly) board.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with you, using images would be like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Our Spanish site will be soon moving into the same format as our English site, that is a dinamic content, vBulletin-based site. I have done some things that would make it harder for people to copy our content in our English site, I will do the same when I move the Spanish site.

And I have to be honest, I don’t patrol the web seeking copyright violators, these sites are most times sent to me by my own readers who also find it dishonest. Most times if they provide a link back to our site I just let it be. Yesterday I also complained to another webmaster who promptly replied with an apology, removed all our content and warned members to stop posting material from ANY site without permission. He told me his forums were lifted completely, threads, titles, usernames and all by another forum and he was still pissed by that battle.

Univision is not the little guy. They can afford lawyers like I can afford rice and beans. They produce TV, and as I believe also music. Wanna ask them their opinion on piracy? If their forum were moderated, in any meaningful sense, this would not be happening. Anyone can see that people are just reposting material and pictures from other sites, some with copyright notices or URL watermarks, yet nobody is doing anything. The only reason that they are re-hosting my pictures is because I stopped them from hotlinking two years ago (there’s a thread about it somewhere in the pit). They had hotlinked dozens of my photos in their forum and were draining my bandwith.

If it came to their attention that I was reproducing material from their site you can bet your patootie that they would not send me a wishy washy “would you please” email.

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[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
I agree with you, using images would be like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Our Spanish site will be soon moving into the same format as our English site, that is a dinamic content, vBulletin-based site. I have done some things that would make it harder for people to copy our content in our English site, I will do the same when I move the Spanish site.
[/QUOTE]

Well, I don’t know if you care for more suggestions, but IIRC there is free PHP code out there that will dynamically take text and turn it into a GIF. For my recipe site (yes, I actually ran recipe site for a while…) I had PHP code that auto-made PDF files from text out of a MySQL database, so I know it can be done. Just a suggestion; I won’t post here again.

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[QUOTE=Una Persson]
Well, I don’t know if you care for more suggestions, but IIRC there is free PHP code out there that will dynamically take text and turn it into a GIF. For my recipe site (yes, I actually ran recipe site for a while…) I had PHP code that auto-made PDF files from text out of a MySQL database, so I know it can be done. Just a suggestion; I won’t post here again.
[/QUOTE]

What would this do to searchability?

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The best thing about replacing the text with a picture of the text is that if they do hotlink it, you can just replace the image with a very explicit one. :smiley:

30

[QUOTE=lissener]
What would this do to searchability?
[/QUOTE]

Well, you’ld lose the ability of web crawlers to index the site (unless you auto-generated META keywords in the page, which is certainly doable), but on the site itself the text in the database would be searchable. I guess it depends on what your goals are, and I can’t speak for anyone else.

Alternately, one could just have the ingredients list inserted as a graphic, converted from text on the fly. People tend to search for things like “goat cheese quesadilla” in Google, as opposed to “1/4 cup spring onions”.

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[QUOTE=nameless]
Guys, I patented breathing a long time ago, and I don’t remember licensing that out to anyone. Stop that right now.
[/QUOTE]

I hold the registered trademark that is your SDMB handle. Pick another name.

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[QUOTE=Una Persson]
Well, I don’t know if you care for more suggestions, but IIRC there is free PHP code out there that will dynamically take text and turn it into a GIF. For my recipe site (yes, I actually ran recipe site for a while…) I had PHP code that auto-made PDF files from text out of a MySQL database, so I know it can be done. Just a suggestion; I won’t post here again.
[/QUOTE]
It also makes the site unusable for blind people.

And can’t you copy out of a pdf file?

I’m pretty sure that modern search engines either mostly or entirely ignore meta keywords, since they are so often abused.

Just imagizing the ingredients would work, though. In fact, if you wanted to be really devious, you could just make one line of the ingredients or one instruction in the recipe into an image. People copying it might not notice that they didn’t have the whole thing, and their attempts at cooking it would be awful :wink:

And if you set the alt text for the image with that line, it might not even screw with blind people trying to read the recipes.

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[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
It also makes the site unusable for blind people.
[/QUOTE]

Well, so is my online art gallery. My proposed solution may not be the one anyone wants to use.

What I mean is, many things are possible. On my site, all recipes were explicitly listed as public domain, including detailed commentary, so I didn’t care who copied them. The purpose of the PDF was to make for pretty printing.

I don’t know that that is true. I don’t know that it’s false, either. Mighty_Girl had a rant going on where she was expressing her justifiable frustration at unseemly behaviour by a big corporation which would not hesitate to sue her into the Stone Age were their positions reverseed, and I butted in. I think we should talk about solutions in a thread elsewhere.

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[QUOTE=Una Persson]
Well, you’ld lose the ability of web crawlers to index the site (unless you auto-generated META keywords in the page, which is certainly doable), but on the site itself the text in the database would be searchable. I guess it depends on what your goals are, and I can’t speak for anyone else.

Alternately, one could just have the ingredients list inserted as a graphic, converted from text on the fly. People tend to search for things like “goat cheese quesadilla” in Google, as opposed to “1/4 cup spring onions”.
[/QUOTE]

FWIW, not that I’m probably typical, but the only time I google for recipes is when I have an ingredient I can’t think what to do with. So I, for one, am more likely to search for (in your example) “onions” than “goat cheese quesadilla.”

Not that this ain’t a hijack or anything.

My suggestion to the OP? Write your recipes more baroquely. Instead of a series of brief instructions, which may or may not be copyrightable, fold the instructions into a more elaborate narrative. Describe the process of cooking; add your own personality. It might be fun, and it will make it way harder for people to legitimately cut and paste from your site.

35

Isn’t it just a post by a forum member who probalbly doesn’t know any better?

36

Well, it isn’t a post by a forum member. More like **lots **of posts by **lots **of forum members. But please notice how my main beef isn’t with them, it’s not like the people who post in my forums are copyright lawyers or scholars, they are just as ignorant. It is up to me as admin, to lay the law of the land. That’s why we have never been asked to remove content from our forums, because we cannot condone that which we criticize.

We produce intellectual property, we have published two recipe books, and we don’t want to be doing what others are doing to us. It isn’t always perfect but at least we strive for it. How comes a corportation that make money out of intellectual property doesn’t care about others’? I don’t come here to read what I could in another site.

I have a huge amount of respect for the SDMB, and one of the reasons I stay here is because people are compelled to produce their own material, and to respect others’ property.

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[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
And I have to be honest, I don’t patrol the web seeking copyright violators, these sites are most times sent to me by my own readers who also find it dishonest.
[/QUOTE]
This is kind of why I think that (initially unsatisfying though it may be) registering on Univision’s boards and just posting messages in the offending threads saying something like “This content was copied without permission from www.cocinadominica.com; please visit us if you enjoyed it” might be the most productive thing. Yikes, that was a tortured sentence. You get the idea, though.

At the end of the day, I think you could wind up spending a lot of effort here chasing something that may feel good to stamp out, but might not actually benefit you a whole lot. Just like Una, I entirely agree with you re: the probable hypocrisy of Univision in this area, but I guess it just comes down to a trade-off for you with how much time you’re willing to put in to stopping this sort of thing versus what it actually gets you in return. A guilt-trip approach might work far better than the legal avenue, and might actually bring more people to your site. Fundamentally you have a much nicer*, more user-friendly site than theirs, and if you link to it from the offending threads, you might pick up more users than you would otherwise, even though it might be highly annoying to have those threads survive in the short term.

  • I can’t emphasise this enough. I nearly went blind browsing their forums, and yours is extremely easy on the eye.
38

“Pay Now With One Click”? That’s mine.
You lazy bastards.

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[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
This is kind of why I think that (initially unsatisfying though it may be) registering on Univision’s boards and just posting messages in the offending threads saying something like “This content was copied without permission from www.cocinadominica.com; please visit us if you enjoyed it” might be the most productive thing. Yikes, that was a tortured sentence. You get the idea, though.
[/QUOTE]
I thought the same thing, but wouldn’t that be spamming (which is the second biggest problem I have in my site)?

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[QUOTE=Mighty_Girl]
I thought the same thing, but wouldn’t that be spamming (which is the second biggest problem I have in my site)?
[/QUOTE]

I have the copyright to spamming. Please send me 1¢ for each spam you send or receive.