The Open Recipe Project's mission statement is to create a collection of free, high-quality, public domain recipes to empower individuals to create meals that support their lifestyles and needs.
As someone who has interest in eating healthy food that is affordable, I desired to create a meal planner app that would suggest random recipes to me once a week. In order to build a meal planner app that would suggest recipes, I would need a database of recipes from which to choose from. There exist many sources online that host recipes, so I believed I could use this information for my own idea. While mere listings of ingredients are not copyrightable, "creative works" of such information is copyrightable (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).
I believed I could use/create a screen scraper to pull only ingredient lists from recipes from various websites for my own purposes (trying to respect copyright and others' original work), but these very companies who host such recipes require that you not scrape their site data as part of their terms of use. I found that the terms and conditions of BigOven was notably hypocritical, given that they have a tool that can pull recipes from any 19+ other websites.
In particular, we do not allow any automated bots or "screen scrapers" to fetch any of the content – full or partial, hosted herein on another platform, application or website without our express written permission and/or partnership agreement.
This type of behavior makes my blood boil; you create a tool to scrape content from other sites (likely violating their terms of use) and then disallow others from engaging in the same practices.
This isn't a complaint about BigOven, it is not hard to find many other individuals who have created their own web scrapers, and many other meal apps also engage in this practice. I can be a purist, and I believe there is an opportunity for a better solution that benefits everyone that fits within our current laws.
- Post job offers on Upwork and get interested individuals who would like to contribute a recipe to this project.
- Individuals who create a recipe would be paid for their time and expertise.
- Individuals would require to sign a document that their recipe is original, and agree to license their recipe (ingredient list, instructions, pictures) as public domain.
- The recipe would be added to this Github project in a standard format.
This project is very much in it's early stages. If you are interested and/or would like to provide your expertise (legal, technical, culinary), I would encourage you to get involved.