As food bloggers, photos are an art medium we rely on to share our amazing recipes.
So when we find out someone has used our photos and pass them off as their own, it is infuriating.
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but there does appear to be a new spot where bloggers are experiencing theft (new to me at least!)
When we think about Etsy, we think about custom gifts, bespoke home decor, and cute shirts. But did you know, Etsy is a blooming hub of recipe products? And I’m not talking about recipe books or custom recipe cards…I’m talking singular, digital, recipe downloads.
It wasn’t until recently I found out that shop owners found a market to sell recipes.
I have an Etsy shop and never thought about selling individual recipes, so firstly, nice… and also, I need to get in on this!
Secondly, folks in the community are seeing a lot of fraud and theft in some of these recipe shops.
Check out the video below for a tour of what I found, PLUS a quick tutorial on how to do a reverse Google image search and some interesting results I found on my recipes! 👀
How To Find Frauds
You should regularly scrape your site to see if anyone is using your content, especially your photos.
I like to use the Google reverse image search function, but that can be a very manual process.
Some other alternatives include using sites like Pixsy which is a paid service to help you find these types of issues in mass (non-affiliated).
What To Do Next?
Ok, so we found some people who stole our content. What’s the next move?
The very first thing you should do is contact the website owner and ask them to remove your content from their site and/or give them the option to purchase the content rights for them to use.
If your content was stolen on a specific domain, you can search the WHOIS database to find out who owns that site (if their information is not readily available on the site itself).
You also can file a DMCA complaint against a site that has taken your content and used it as their own. I haven’t gone through this process (yet, at least) and I’ve heard it can be a bit complicated, but it can be useful in getting the job done.
In my case, I guess I have to contact Amazon and report the seller who stole my images!
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