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

by bobblywobbles on 7/24/22, 3:55 PM with 16 comments

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.

  • by brad0 on 7/24/22, 6:11 PM

    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

  • by codefreeordie on 7/24/22, 6:02 PM

    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

  • by cuttlefisch on 7/24/22, 5:37 PM

    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.

  • by mannyv on 7/24/22, 5:23 PM

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

  • by brudgers on 7/24/22, 5:54 PM

    If it matters, ask your lawyer.

    If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

    Good luck.

  • by altdataseller on 7/25/22, 12:44 AM

    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.

  • by Pakdef on 7/24/22, 8:14 PM

    I scrapped https://allrecipes.com a few years ago and posted a link to it on reddit... Maybe the file is still up but I'm too lazy to find it right now.

  • by photoGrant on 7/24/22, 4:26 PM

    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