Free world of food blogging creates thicket over copyrights, ethics

You can be certain that everything in this food and wine section is accurate and original. With dozens of reporters, editors, sub-editors, and proofreaders combing each article, a major metropolitan daily newspaper has to be precise, lest it face legal action.

The same, however, can't be said for new media. The advent of the internet has meant that anyone with a cheap laptop, a wireless connection and a few taste buds is now a food writer. Plagiarism, libel and copyright issues are the obvious side effects of such a lack of control, and while the line is definitely drawn when it comes to media law in a print publication, things aren't so clear cut with blogs.

'In general, media laws dealing with defamation and copyright apply to online media the same as they would to traditional media,' says Doreen Weisenhaus, director of the University of Hong Kong's media law project. However, there is no 'umbrella' international law, and the laws in place usually vary with jurisdiction.

Specific to our city, Weisenhaus cites a passage from her book Hong Kong Media Law: 'Hong Kong's Copyright Ordinance was one of the first laws to say that a copyright owner can prevent his or her work from being distributed without permission on the internet. The Hong Kong Intellectual Property Department recommends requesting the ISP [internet service provider] hosting the offending website to remove the infringing material.'

Successful legal action, of course, still depends on a number of factors, including where the copyright infringement victim is and which country hosts the offending blog. Things become even trickier when it comes to food blogging: aside from restaurant reviews, the meat of food writing is recipes, and you can't copyright a list of ingredients. This has caused numerous problems for both bloggers and published authors, especially when a person is considered both.

Dan Lepard is a chef, columnist, cookbook author and blogger. Most recently, he was both celebrated and chastised for asking bloggers who had reprinted his recipes to remove them from their websites. Legal action was never taken, but strongly worded e-mails with links to country-specific copyright protection laws were routinely sent.