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

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11–17 of 17 posts

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

#11
There was a ruling that said that recipes are not copyrightable. However, anything beyond the recipe ingredients and method is copyrightable.

Think images, videos, or that hunk of text detailing their experience as a 5 year old before a recipe.

Way back in the day I ran a public recipe scraping API. It had an option to scrape the image along with the recipe, but you had to set an explicit copyright flag to get them.

There was a HN post about it if you’re curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794949

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

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

go touch grass

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

#14

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

> Scraping and selling is morally not ok

What about hand copying? Is it ok to read a recipe on one site, and write it for your own? Or should the original site own that list of ingredients and instructions?

If it's ok to hand copy but not to scrape, what is the difference? Your personal time cost?

Like most things in life, one simple binary rule does not work for most situations.

Perhaps your primary objection is to the "selling" part. What if merely presenting the information comes at a cost, and you make up for that cost by "selling" access?

Or what if you are providing additional value to the original content?

Or what if you are making the information accessible to a larger audience, particularly one with special accessibility needs? (This may seem like grasping for straws, but so many websites are so badly made that even people with low data and old phones cannot get the content from them. So re-presenting that data in a better way may now make it accessible to a lot more people. Those are people who _could_ not get it from the "original" source in the first place.)

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

#15

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...

You wouldn't bake a car, would you? /s

I could get not ripping off the description and images of a recipe, but refusing to copy ingredients lists is a level of moral piety I can't reach.

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

#16
I mean, in terms of riskiness, this is as least risky as you can get in the field of crawling/scraping. You're not scraping product prices, social media profiles, real estate data, or anything that is majorly commercial - just recipes.

Disclaimer: not legal advice.

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

#17

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

Then I guess Google is not a moral business.
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