While a recipe isn't protected by copyright in the US (and many other countries, including the UK), the wording of the recipe could well be an original literary work, the layout of the page could attract a copyright (as it does in cookbooks) and you're right that the images would be protected.
All that said, if the import is being used for personal use only and not being edited, then it's little different to printing it out and putting it in a binder. I don't know much about US fair-use laws, but in the UK it would seem that reproducing a recipe in an app for your own use would qualify as fair dealing thanks to being personal study.
That only applies if the imports are specific to the person importing them, of course. If they're shared or published, then it's a different story. Also, if you're importing more than one recipe, so it's a significant amount of the published work, then that'd be an issue too. You can't import a whole cookbook and claim it's personal study, but one recipe out of dozens is probably fine.
I assume this would go into DMCA territory, since your hosting user submitted content. As long as you don't host the scraped recipes and images publicly, I imagine it would live in a legal grey area if you had a notice that you must be allowed to use the image you upload in your jurisdiction.
It'd be similar to trying to go after google because someone uploaded a copyrighted work to their google drive. I know they have to deal with it if you share the link, but they don't go out of their way to remove content you uploaded to your google drive and never shared.
Scraping is LEGAL, all search engines scrape to some degree for example, there is a fair use component, so you can't "scrape" 100% of a site and stick it on your domain, but you can still scrape more than zero. In general it is leaning more acceptable than less.
Yeah I understand that part, my question is about showing the scraped data to your users.
https://www.yummly.com/ used to have a paid API for recipe search and currently still lets users search their index. Did they have to go and get permission from each site that they index or is it fair use?
It looks a shade more detailed than google's recipe cards, they link back to the original source for the instructions, I would bet they didn't get permission, and that they count as a fair-use search engine. The law isn't (can't be) perfectly prescriptive here, there's some line that you have to sue about to know if it has been crossed.
If the robots.txt file has no restrictions parsing and scraping is fine. Of course not all scrappers respect robots.txt but they should
But as an internet’s citizen better to always reference the source
All that said, if the import is being used for personal use only and not being edited, then it's little different to printing it out and putting it in a binder. I don't know much about US fair-use laws, but in the UK it would seem that reproducing a recipe in an app for your own use would qualify as fair dealing thanks to being personal study.
That only applies if the imports are specific to the person importing them, of course. If they're shared or published, then it's a different story. Also, if you're importing more than one recipe, so it's a significant amount of the published work, then that'd be an issue too. You can't import a whole cookbook and claim it's personal study, but one recipe out of dozens is probably fine.