Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 17 posts

Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#1

Post by bobblywobbles »

Companies such as AllRecipes, BigOven and Yummly have millions of combined recipes saved within their systems. BigOven, for example, has a clipper tool (https://www.bigoven.com/clipper) that allows users to copy recipes from other sites and save them in BigOven. Based on Copyright Law, lists of ingredients are not copyrightable, but creative works (ie. ingredients + instructions + images) are. Under this understanding, recipes that are copied beyond the ingredient list into BigOven (or other recipe database) would be breaking copyright law.

Are there reputable sources (attorneys) in Copyright law that I can contact - if it's within legal means, I desire to compile a list of recipes (name of food & list of ingredients only) and sell this collection to users who are interested.

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#3

Post by bayswater2p »

photoGrant wrote: post #2

My opinion is simple. Legally isn’t the best argument. Morally is. Scraping and selling is morally not ok. Scraping and selling may legally be possible. I’d rather sleep with myself comfortably at night and stick with the moral police

Well I'm fed up with being belted & whipped by the moral police who are so easily misled & duped into excessively strict moral punishment. Especially when 20 years later the moral police look like conservative uncles who call themselves father's but we all know they should be called uncles... For hitting us with the 'moral stick' & traditional soap in mouth.... Lol uncles...

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#5

Post by overeater »

mannyv wrote: post #4

Supremes have said that cookbooks and other fact collections don't necessarily have copyright protection. Recipes definitely don't.

As a base law, that's helpful, but I'm wondering when it gets into cfaa territory. What if you violate the terms of service to scrape it? What if you have to implement tricks like IP rotating or useragent lying to get the data? What if you accidentally scrape some creative text which is copyrightable, embedded in the recipes and accidentally sell it?

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#6

Post by jokethrowaway »

bayswater2p wrote: post #3
photoGrant wrote: post #2

My opinion is simple. Legally isn’t the best argument. Morally is. Scraping and selling is morally not ok. Scraping and selling may legally be possible. I’d rather sleep with myself comfortably at night and stick with the moral police

Well I'm fed up with being belted & whipped by the moral police who are so easily misled & duped into excessively strict moral punishment. Especially when 20 years later the moral police look like conservative uncles who call themselves father's but we all know they should be called uncles... For hitting us with the 'moral stick' & traditional soap in mouth.... Lol uncles...

The moral police hasn't been conservative for 20+ years. Now we're in the age of liberal political correctness.

(It has been an interesting experience to side more with conservatives than liberals for the first time in my life, but we live in the society in which we live)

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#7

Post by cuttlefisch »

If it is publicly accessible, they cannot limit the means by which you access the information from the perspective of the law. This was seen in the case of Oracle & another company scraping their technical documentation IIRC (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-...). The site may take action to prevent this access, etc. but they cannot pursue legal action for this alone (unless this has changed in the last couple of years). There was a similar precedent with Linkedin maybe 5-7 years ago.

That being said, depending on the target they can make things difficult if they know you're doing it. In general, scraping data itself, then transforming that data for use is reasonably safe, but using the scraped content in unprocessed form can be problematic. Selling the collected data to users without processing it sounds like it could cause problems both from the target companies, as well as via the customer's perception of how you acquire the data. Processing the data to show something like variations in recipes per region, categorizing different recipes into styles based on ingredients, cook time, complexity, etc. are all value-adds which make your data more useful than the raw data-set, and make a stronger argument for the sale of your dataset.

Of course IANAL, and I welcome anyone else to add to or contradict this info.

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#8

Post by photoGrant »

bayswater2p wrote: post #3
photoGrant wrote: post #2

My opinion is simple. Legally isn’t the best argument. Morally is. Scraping and selling is morally not ok. Scraping and selling may legally be possible. I’d rather sleep with myself comfortably at night and stick with the moral police

Well I'm fed up with being belted & whipped by the moral police who are so easily misled & duped into excessively strict moral punishment. Especially when 20 years later the moral police look like conservative uncles who call themselves father's but we all know they should be called uncles... For hitting us with the 'moral stick' & traditional soap in mouth.... Lol uncles...

I'm talking personally, after someone asked. I wouldn't be lashing out on the general public with such opinions. I only can be aware and control my own actions.

Re: Ask HN: What is the legality of scraping recipe ingredient lists?

#10

Post by codefreeordie »

The purely-mechanical portion of the recipe (list of ingredients and instructions) are excluded from copyright. Any other non-mechanical content (pictures, but also descriptions of the recipe or all that flavor/story text that pollutes modern online recipe sites ) will be protected by copyright.

Additionally, it is likely that collation or curation of the recipes into categories or collections or sites is protected by copyright.

Finally, if the website posts terms and conditions which limit or restrict your access, you might end up with some liability should you violate them. This is still an area of law that is shifting, but according to the American Bar Association, courts now somewhat routinely enforce terms-and-conditions when clear notice is given to the user and the terms are not unduly long or confusing. In general, the situations most likely to be enforceable are when the user sees a clear prompt to agree to the Ts and Cs, and clicks an I Agree button. The further away from such a clear agreement one strays, the less likely a court is to consider access/use of the site as agreement to the Ts and Cs as a binding contract.

I am not a lawyer, I am not representing you, and this is not legal advice

Post reply on HN