Plan to Eat allows our customers to store their recipes online and access them from any device with an internet connection. Plan to Eat is not a recipe publisher or aggregator.
We do not automatically scrape the web like a search engine and publish those recipes to our audience. The only recipes contained in Plan to Eat are the recipes our customers add to their account, which are never published to the web by us.
We don't own or share our customers' recipes
Plan to Eat will not publish or distribute recipes that belong to our customers in any way. From our Terms of Use: “Your profile and all Content (recipes, images, feedback, and other information) added to your account remain yours. We claim no intellectual property rights over the Content you provide. Plan to Eat does not preview Content, but we have the right (while unlikely) to refuse or remove any content at any time.”
Recipes added to a Plan to Eat account are unpublished to the web by default. They are only available to that Plan to Eat user’s account until they choose to share them using the link (URL) or by making them visible to Friends within Plan to Eat. If the recipe was imported from another website, the recipe directions will be missing to the one to whom the recipe is shared, and can only be made visible to them when they visit the original website.
Any recipe in Plan to Eat can be marked as Private. Private recipes can only be viewed by the Plan to Eat account owner, and cannot be accessed by a shared web address (URL) or by Plan to Eat Friends.
Plan to Eat asks search engines not to index any of our customers’ recipes so that they will never show up in search results.
US Copyright laws about recipes (FL-122)
"Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients, such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook."
We go beyond the copyright laws to protect recipe authors
We love food, and we love authors who love food. In partnership with those authors, we have adopted the following practices to protect their intellectual property:
Plan to Eat users are responsible for the content they choose to put into their Recipe Books. Plan to Eat does not monitor content submitted by our customers, but we do reserve the right to refuse or remove any content at any time.
Recipes imported into Plan to Eat from other websites contain a permanent link back to the original source recipe. This provides a stamp of ownership to the original author and helps Plan to Eat users find more recipes from that author.
When an imported recipe is shared within Plan to Eat using the Friends tab, the viewer of that recipe may see the listing of ingredients, but must visit the original website to view the directions. Once they visit the original website, the directions will appear to them in Plan to Eat.
When an imported recipe is shared with someone who is not logged into Plan to Eat, or they don't have an account, going to the original website won't unlock the directions on the recipe in Plan to Eat. They will need to use the original recipe site to reference the recipe.
These methods ensure that the original recipe author receives the traffic and recognition that they deserve, while introducing their recipes to a broader audience through Plan to Eat.
Additional privacy for recipe authors
If you are a recipe author and would like additional privacy for your content, please let us know by emailing help@plantoeat.com, and we can add your website to our opt-out list. Recipes imported from your website will remain permanently private, visible only to the Plan to Eat user who imported them, and cannot be made public or shared in any way.