Stealing food bloggers photographs and passing them off as your own is not okay.

Would it be surprising to hear that pretty much on a daily basis I get emails from my readers letting me know that they have found my photographs, (and whatever recipe accompanies the photo), stolen and posted somewhere else online? It is sad, but true.

I have touched on slightly similar topics on my blog when I asked if it is okay to post other food bloggers recipes at your site when the recipe had turned out bad. Be sure to check that post out and leave a comment with your thoughts.

Today, though, I am addressing a bigger issue of people stealing copyrighted photographs and posting them as if they were their own work. A lot of work goes into maintaining a food blog. Picking out the recipes, shopping, prepping, cooking, photographing and finally editing photographs and writing up a post. It is so discouraging when someone simply copy and pastes your work and posts it online, not even bothering to link back to you or to ask for permission before taking your photographs.

Do these people really have no clue that what they are doing is just down right gross? It sickens me, it really does. I have worked with some very nice people in the past who took a moment to email me and ask for permission to post my work on their websites, websites where they earn money from each hit they get, and I have been happy to work with them. People who steal, who crop out your watermark, who take your photograph and recipes and repost it to earn money off of my hard work -- that is disgusting.

There is one particular person doing this to many food bloggers as of late, and when I asked her to take my photograph down, she told me it was my own fault that she took my content. I was and still am a bit flabbergasted. Get a clue and get the hell off my blog, lady. *grin*  That is as polite as I can be to rude and nasty people. In the past I have had more patience with this sort of thing, but as of late it is just getting to be too much.

Do the right thing. Stop stealing things online and passing them off as your own, providing no courtesy link back to where you took it from. Be a good human being and stop trying to profit from other peoples hard work, work that they put their heart and sweat into. What say you blog readers?