Are there any legal issues with scraping recipe sites in a commercial app like that?
I'm assuming ingredients and directions are "facts" so can't be copyrighted, but what about the pictures?
I'm assuming ingredients and directions are "facts" so can't be copyrighted, but what about the pictures?
All that said, if the import is being used for personal use only and not being edited, then it's little different to printing it out and putting it in a binder. I don't know much about US fair-use laws, but in the UK it would seem that reproducing a recipe in an app for your own use would qualify as fair dealing thanks to being personal study.
That only applies if the imports are specific to the person importing them, of course. If they're shared or published, then it's a different story. Also, if you're importing more than one recipe, so it's a significant amount of the published work, then that'd be an issue too. You can't import a whole cookbook and claim it's personal study, but one recipe out of dozens is probably fine.
It'd be similar to trying to go after google because someone uploaded a copyrighted work to their google drive. I know they have to deal with it if you share the link, but they don't go out of their way to remove content you uploaded to your google drive and never shared.
https://www.yummly.com/ used to have a paid API for recipe search and currently still lets users search their index. Did they have to go and get permission from each site that they index or is it fair use?