Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

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On recipe blogs, you are probably not looking at the actual author monetizing. Rather, someone decided to create a copycat website, hire a minimum-wage content writer off a freelancing platform to rewrite the original text so that no copyright violation is apparent, and then they put the copycat website up with a boatload of advertising and SEO. The 15 paragraphs are an SEO trick, as Google gives higher weight to longform text.

This ecosystem is now so advanced that new copycat recipe sites are based on existing copycat sites. You can easily tell if a recipe website is a copycat by comparing the supposed author bio to the quality of the English. If the author bio claims these are recipes by a born and bred Louisiana native who wants to share Southern cooking with the world, but the actual text is full of grammatical mistakes typical of Eastern Europeans or South/Southeast Asians, it is clearly a rewritten copycat site.

Yeah, exactly. Although in addition to the text acting as SEO, the initial reasoning behind all the "recipes-as-blogs" approaches is that recipes are not in general copyrightable, as they aren't generally considered creative works. (Whether the food itself is a creative work is not the question, it's whether the text qualifies as such.) So cookbook/recipe blog writers add enough text to the recipe to make the content subject to copyright protections.

Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the recipe, they churn out new replacement text.

You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no need or desire to have those be copyrighted.

Great point.

There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the publishers magazine.

The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver adverts.

THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such hot property the founders sold up.

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