Is this legal?

Dana O'Byrne

I'm not sure of the legal side of things, but as far as I can see the recipes are collected shared by members, and not owned by Whisk... NY Times Cooking recipes would still be behind paywall, so I think it's more a collection of links from different sites but with a "preview" user friendly interface. What is different is the comments on recipes. It's the best kind of social platform.

Sara Kielbasa

Seems to work similarly to another platform Pinterest - where links to other websites, blogs, shopping items can be easily stored and saved for later. They still send you to the site it originated from for the steps of the recipe so it's not like they're plagiarizing the recipes. Also Pinterest has been around and popular for over 10 years so I would doubt this app doing the same thing for recipes is much different

Katherine Fultz

In terms of intellectual property, you can't copyright ingredient lists. The only thing that is under copyright is the instruction list, which is why Whisk links to the original website (and doesn't pull from behind paywalls). It's basically just a link aggregator, which is legal.

Orlanne Pinsault

Yes I am not sure Whisk owns the recipes since users share the link from different blogs and give credits to the authors. I think this is legal but not 100% sure 🤔

Annabelle

I worked on a similar (now dead) app years ago. I think the consensus from the app owner (who had spoken to lawyers) was because the app hosts the ingredient only and links to the original source for the method it was good. It would be illegal if Whisk took the data without credit or links and claimed the content was all theirs own creation.

Matt Z

Thank you so much everyone for the helpful and kind answers, very highly appreciated!