Personal Facebook/blog rant
I'm debating posting this to my Facebook wall...
I follow several food blogs - Iowa Girl Eats, Week of Menus, Yammy's Noshery, to name a few. Most especially I follow the Just Bento/Just Hungry blogs. A Japanese lady married to a Swiss man, living in France and sharing Japanese bento cuisine with the world. She just recovered from a battle with uterine cancer - seriously almost died - her doctor told her afterwards he hadn't thought she'd make it. Her blog (& book) provide income and she's only just getting back on track after the cancer.
Well, she posted on her Facebook page about how there's a huge problem lately for food bloggers - recipes can't be strictly copyrighted but the photos each blogger takes are theirs legally. And Facebook groups are stealing their pictures, posting their recipes, and never even acknowledging where the recipe came from. This takes revenue from the bloggers who get income from the advertising on their sites, not to mention potential followers, book sales and so on. If the group shared the picture and said "go to this site for the recipe" it would be one thing. But they don't. And then all their followers share to their walls, whose friends share to their walls, and another group steals from that group and it's an ever-widening mess.
So since then I've been paying attention. And you know what I see almost daily? People sharing recipes that I recognize from the blogs I've been following for years. But the recipes don't link to the blog. They don't even mention the source. They link to Facebook groups who seem to specialize in posting recipe after recipe, thinking that a blanket disclaimer of "these aren't ours" makes it okay when they've taken someone else's photo, cropped it down (usually to remove the bloggers logo) and posted a condensed form of the recipe.
It's really happening a lot and makes me mad. This doesn't even have to apply to just food blogs. If it takes me 3 minutes to track down a site by dragging the photo to Google Image search, what's the group or communities excuse? Ignorance? A disregard for internet propriety? I just know I refuse to be part of the problem. And now anyone who's read my rant knows what's going on, too. So I guess the ball's in your court the next time you see a group posting something that's not properly attributed. You can still appreciate the recipe or craft or whatever & find the original source. Or just share it anyway and be part of the problem...
I follow several food blogs - Iowa Girl Eats, Week of Menus, Yammy's Noshery, to name a few. Most especially I follow the Just Bento/Just Hungry blogs. A Japanese lady married to a Swiss man, living in France and sharing Japanese bento cuisine with the world. She just recovered from a battle with uterine cancer - seriously almost died - her doctor told her afterwards he hadn't thought she'd make it. Her blog (& book) provide income and she's only just getting back on track after the cancer.
Well, she posted on her Facebook page about how there's a huge problem lately for food bloggers - recipes can't be strictly copyrighted but the photos each blogger takes are theirs legally. And Facebook groups are stealing their pictures, posting their recipes, and never even acknowledging where the recipe came from. This takes revenue from the bloggers who get income from the advertising on their sites, not to mention potential followers, book sales and so on. If the group shared the picture and said "go to this site for the recipe" it would be one thing. But they don't. And then all their followers share to their walls, whose friends share to their walls, and another group steals from that group and it's an ever-widening mess.
So since then I've been paying attention. And you know what I see almost daily? People sharing recipes that I recognize from the blogs I've been following for years. But the recipes don't link to the blog. They don't even mention the source. They link to Facebook groups who seem to specialize in posting recipe after recipe, thinking that a blanket disclaimer of "these aren't ours" makes it okay when they've taken someone else's photo, cropped it down (usually to remove the bloggers logo) and posted a condensed form of the recipe.
It's really happening a lot and makes me mad. This doesn't even have to apply to just food blogs. If it takes me 3 minutes to track down a site by dragging the photo to Google Image search, what's the group or communities excuse? Ignorance? A disregard for internet propriety? I just know I refuse to be part of the problem. And now anyone who's read my rant knows what's going on, too. So I guess the ball's in your court the next time you see a group posting something that's not properly attributed. You can still appreciate the recipe or craft or whatever & find the original source. Or just share it anyway and be part of the problem...