Bee Yinn Low has something to say to those who plagiarize from food blogs: Stop! Back in 2007, Low, the blogger behind the popular Rasa Malaysia food blog, posted a photo she'd taken of an elegantly plated sliver of miso-marinated black cod (pictured), which she'd made with a recipe from her Nobu cookbook.
Almost two years later, she spied the very same photo on the email advertisements of Florida-based Rosas Farms, advertising their sustainably farmed black cod. Low might have been surprised, but this was not the first time this had happened - she had discovered Rasa Malaysia photos and stories being passed off as other people's work everywhere from food blogs to eBay seller sites to the awning of a Malaysian cafe.
Neither Rosas Farms nor any of the other sites had credited Low as the creator of the photos, breaking the terms of her Creative Commons license. The photos, like the rest of Rasa Malaysia's content, are also protected with Copyscape, a service which helps prevent plagiarism by searching the web for sites that have been using your content.
So Low finally decided to fight back. Under a post titled "An Open Letter to My Thieves," she posted screenshots of the offenders. The topic clearly hit a nerve, with more than 60 commenters wring in to express sympathy and share their own plagiarism stories. One commenter even suggested starting a food bloggers union with a lawyer on retainer!
Blogger Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim has also written about post plagiarism in the past, and has linked to a site advising bloggers what to do when someone has used their writing without proper credit.
Have any of you food bloggers out there had your work plagiarized? What did you do?
2-23-2009 @5:59PM Seth R. Feldman said... Seeking an attorney is a good idea. I'm an attorney and see no reason why blog content isn't protected by copyright law...cease and desist letters should be sent to the offenders. Besides copyright law, there are other legal remedies that might exist as well.
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2-23-2009 @9:51PM Kitt said... I've had scrapers lift my posts wholesale. I filed complaints with Google, which removed the offending posts on its Blogger blogs (but did not shut down the blogs entirely, even though ALL the content was stolen). And I switched my blog feed to the short form for a while so the content could not easily be scraped that way.
I'm appalled at the response from Erin Rosas to the request that she stop using someone else's copyrighted image. It was unprofessional and frankly stupid.
Kitt
http://www.kittalog.com
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2-24-2009 @1:40PM Rasa Malaysia said... Thanks for reporting this incident. We cannot eradicate this issue / problem that bloggers face on a daily basis but hopefully we can alert some of the content thieves out there that they can't hide.
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2-24-2009 @2:28PM katerina said... I have started tagging my blog name on my photos.
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2-25-2009 @4:43AM Eric Hwang said... I just had my most recent post http://bricksofwine.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/new-j-bookwalter-releases/ scraped and posted on some site in the Czech Republic simply for the ad hits. I sent a formal DMCA complaint to the hosting provider but I'm not too hopeful for any resolution through them. I also plan to complain to Google since copyright infringement is a clear violation of Googles advertising terms.
Aside from that, I've reduced my feed to just a summary, I've added copyright notices to all my posts now and plan to add watermarking to all my images just to make it a little more difficult to use. If hosting providers don't acknowledge and shut down offending sites, the only options bloggers have is to demand media attention and shame these sites out of existence. But that too will be an uphill struggle.
As WordPress states on their support site, if you don't want your work copied, don't post it on the Internet. It would be a shame to lose useful content because of this issue.
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