Well I got a not so friendly letter from ACP's Legal Department asking I mean telling me to remove some of their recipes from my blog. The ones they specifically wanted removed were the ones from the Womens Weekly Cupcakes book. Given ACP's recent stoush with a blogger it's not surprising that they've relegated all of us to the "evil must be stopped" pile but it's unfortunate that they don't see the value of blogs.
Food bloggers routinely republish recipes from cookbooks because they want to share them with others and in turn, some readers may be opened up to cookbooks or authors that they may not have known about or were just curious about and often purchase the book in question (which I can clearly see from the data I get from Amazon and emails I receive). As far as I have seen, we always publish the source of the recipe, as I did, so it's not a matter or stealing a recipe and claiming it as your own (to me, a worse infringement). Nor do people pick out large chunks of a book, it's usually your favourite recipes that you pick to make. Food bloggers also give honest feedback about the recipe and whether it works as well as provide pictures which is useful to everyone.
To think that as food bloggers, we will be contacted by some lawyer to remove the recipes which we've taken the time to make and write about is disturbing. I suppose this means that the only choice we have in the future is to rewrite the recipe (which is easy enough) but then we would be forced not give the source for fear that they will send us legal letters. Although intuitively speaking, I think that a cookbook's author would rather be given credit and have more copies of their book sell than have us change the recipe and delete their involvement in it. I only hope that the other authors featured on food blogs are not as petty and see their recipe inclusion as testaments to their recipes and of course, more potential sales, than anything else.
So in any case, I've been told to remove the recipes by the 11th of September which I have done. I have removed their recipes from the following stories and replaced them with even better recipes:
[Passionfruit Coconut cupcakes
](http://www.notquitenigella.com/2008/04/14/passionfruit-coconut-cupcakes/)
Banana and Caramel Almost Bannoffee cupcakes
I shall also stop using that cookbook and other ACP books (hmmm flicking through the spines on my bookshelf I have no other ACP books) but this is more out of the negative feelings I get from picking it up. **
But who is going to talk to ACP about them "borrowing" the decorating ideas from Claire Crespo's book? ;)
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