Plagiarism

[lemniscate]

Very, very interesting situation for basically the entire published recipe industry.

[ElsieD]

I had read about this in one of Nagi's columns some time ago.  She even showed a recipe of hers side by side with the one Bellamy had in her book.  The were indeed identical, save for a word here and there.

[rotuts]

a while back , I looked up via google a few Rx's for SV carnitas

 

I noted that several had the same basic template

 

ie author picture , upper R  .  two line bio  underneath 

same fonts  several times . same basic description of method 

 

a few minor ingredient changes in one or two

 

and , get this :  one person forgot to add the amounts of each ingredient  in the ingredient list !

 

the same list !

 

so its clear , via very little work , Rx's on the internet are meant to garnish clicks for ads.

 

going way back , Martha Fellow stole an Rx from a previous FR cookbook.  verbatim 

 

lost suit , paid up.

 

then in a later book , did the same thing taking material from the same author

 

in a later book .  lost suit , paid up .

 

didnt bother Felon in any way it seems

 

etc.

 

so plagiarism is not new.  its now just on Steriods .

Edited Friday at 02:08 PM by rotuts (log)

[JAZ]

it's definitely true that recipe plagiarism is nothing new. Back in 2018, I had just written a book for the then brand new Ninja Foodi (the first pressure cooker/air fryer combo). I was looking around on Amazon to see what other books were out for that appliance, and I stumbled across a couple of books that had stolen dozens of my recipes. The weird thing was that the stolen recipes were from my first pressure cooker cookbook. In some cases, the recipe titles were changed, but the recipes themselves were copied verbatim. I let my editor know, and my publisher got Amazon to delete the books, but new books kept springing up with the same recipes copied. it turned out that someone had printed the whole text of my book online, so it was easy for anyone to steal from it. Once my publisher got that taken down, the problems stopped. In a way, I was lucky that the idiots stealing the recipes didn't change them, so it was relatively easy to prove they were stolen.

 

With so many food blogs out there now, it's sad but not terribly surprising that unscrupulous authors steal content. It does surprise me that the publisher (Penguin in this case) didn't respond better to the accusation.

[blue_dolphin]

3 hours ago, JAZ said:

It does surprise me that the publisher (Penguin in this case) didn't respond better to the accusation.

Yes, 100% on that.
Sorry you had to chase pirates to protect your own work!

[Margaret Pilgrim]

It is boggling how rampant and unapologetic recipe plagiarism is.   

 

I took a cooking class from a noted San Francisco woman in 1980.    I had just purchased Marcella's new classic Italian book.   Our instructor passed out copies of the recipe we were making.   It immediately looked familiar to me, and checking when I got  home I found to be verbatim from Hazan.   Shameless.

[liuzhou]

Plagiarism in cookbooks has been going on since cookbooks were invented. The 5th century cook book usually known as Apicus was full of earlier recipes. Some recipes even included ingredients that had gone extinct since the originals were written.

The famous Victorian Mrs Beeton's cookbook (1861) was crammed with recipes from earlier writers.

 

Nothing new.

 

 

[chromedome]

12 hours ago, liuzhou said:

The famous Victorian Mrs Beeton's cookbook (1861) was crammed with recipes from earlier writers.

 

Nothing new.

 

Yeah, notably Eliza Acton. I downloaded Acton's cookbook from Project Gutenberg at one point, for an article I was writing. It was an interesting read, though it must be said that I'm a soft touch where vintage cookbooks are concerned. 

[weinoo]

In my opinion, with AI, it's only gonna get worse.

[KennethT]

2 minutes ago, weinoo said:

In my opinion, with AI, it's only gonna get worse.

maybe, maybe not.  Now, with AI, it's easier to check to see if what you have written was plagiarized - publishers can run text through it (even Grammarly has an AI function that checks for plagiarism now) and refuse to publish something if they find a high enough percentage of similarity to previous works.

[rotuts]

remember the common denominator :  $$$

 

always tough to beat.

[chromedome]

3 hours ago, KennethT said:

maybe, maybe not.  Now, with AI, it's easier to check to see if what you have written was plagiarized - publishers can run text through it (even Grammarly has an AI function that checks for plagiarism now) and refuse to publish something if they find a high enough percentage of similarity to previous works.

Sadly, those are not especially reliable. It's especially problematic when writing about hands-on topics (like cooking, or DIY, or what have you) because there are only so many ways to say "add the wet ingredients to the dry," "tighten the bolts," etc. 

 

The AI-checkers are even worse (ie, the tools intended to identify blocks of text that may have been created by generative AI), and several of them were pulled from the market after their makers were forced to concede that they were about as effective as a Magic 8-ball.