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I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also entitled to your righteous defense?

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That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a successful ethical system.

But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.

We're considering the angle of an app whose sole purpose is to capture the valuable IP of an author and remove their ability to monetize it.

It's not like they're paying them via some publisher program, just pure scraping and re-organizing.

You may be right, if the sites truly own original content that is then being displayed in the app. It seems that is often not the case though.

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