tinebak
tinebak on Hacker News
Paprika works exactly the same, as does Evernote and Pocket. Apple has not by the way, complained about copyright infringement.
The app wasn't blocked for copyright infringement. Apple hasn't asked for any changes. Evernote isn't blocked, or Pocket. You're talking about something different.
Copy Me That only scrapes a recipe when the user clicks the share button on a wepage, like Evernote. It's not a crwler.
I'm curious why you call it malware? You can visit a website, find a recipe you like, click a button, and the recipe gets copied to you recipe box. It's like Evernote, but is specific for recipes. Then you can edit the recipe, create meal plans, etc.
I also think it's worth noting that the content that they're complaining about is saved to private accounts. DropBox (Google Drive, etc., etc.) isn't responsible for stuff you save to your private accounts. Also, Apple hasn't said that the app violates any rules or laws. They just want the complaints resolved, whatever they may be.
I have sued Jill Selkowitch. My lawyer says that it will cost $40K, at least, and take more than 6 months before it gets before a judge. Jill Selkowitch has now filed to get the case dismissed trying to argue (for real) that there is no conflict for a judge to rule on. So now I have to pay to respond to that. I also can't keep suing anyone who files a complaint. Apple allowing this is the real problem.
Posted by
tinebak on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @10:13AM
from the self-post dept.
After having my app in the App Store for years, Apple took it down because of a couple of false complaints. Apple hasn't said that the app breaks any rules, just that all complaints must be resolved "to the satisfaction of the complainant."It's insane that Apple gives this kind of power to a few people. I don't think Apple has even really read the complaints or looked into the app at all.I have...
I do need to look a lot more into the whole Community search aspect of Copy Me That. So many fun things that I want to do :)
How weird, it IS all salmon! :) The front page can have a bit of a theme if someone quickly copies in a lot of similar recipes, for example, if he/she is looking for the best salmon recipes from around the web. However, the front page is limited to three recipes from any given person's recipe box. The front page might also show several copies of the same recipe if that recipe suddenly becomes very popular. However, then the recipes would all be showing the exact same salmon recipe. But this is lots of different people copying in salmon recipes from lots of different websites! The world has gone bonkers for salmon.
The front page (Community page) looks different if you're logged in because it updates more often. Maybe I need to re-think the time frame because now the website is stuck on all salmon for two hours for non-logged in users (unless they do a search).
Recipes aren't but images always are. Collections of recipes (such as a cookbook) are also protected.
There are hardly any unsuccessful results. (Assuming that the page actually contains a recipe.) People have copied recipes from more than 70,000 websites into their recipe boxes. Of course, I can't check that all the millions of recipes have been accurately copied, but we do check a lot and also get terrific feedback. The parser first goes through all lines/sentences on the page and gives them a rank based on whether it seems to be an ingredient or step. Then it looks at groupings (several steps together) and then the placement of the ingredients compared to the steps.
I don't know about this scraper, but one thing that mine does (
http://www.copymethat.com) is to "read" the complete page looking for certain word combinations that indicate ingredients or steps. It also considers styles and location on the page and looks for keywords that tend to start or end a recipe. It then picks what it considers to be the strongest recipe on the page. This means that it can pick up some weird things if the page doesn't actually contain a recipe; It really wants to find one!
That's funny! I'm not seeing any pizza recipes now. It shows the latest shared recipes that have images. There are trends, though. One person wrote and complained that vegans were taking over the website, but the next day the Community was back to having lots of meat. The app got a bad review in the app store because this person said that Copy Me That was always showing pot recipes!
I'm working on this and finding that it's a lot of work (and code) to identify the actual ingredient. Consider "all-purpose sifted flour." That's the same ingredient as "plain flour." So (so!) many ways to write the same ingredient. I'm getting there, though :)
I made a recipe scraper that doesn't look at the structured (schema) data, but instead "reads" the whole page to detect the recipe. I found that there are too many recipe sites that don't use the schema rules including, of course, recipes from Facebook posts and emails. Users have used it to copy recipes into their recipe boxes from more than 70,000 different websites. There are a lot of different formats out there!