[inanutshellus]

I don't really follow. Who cares about copyright of their blog post when a recipe can't be copyrighted (ergo the valuable asset is not protected)?

My understanding is that it's Google PageRank's "fault".

Because every one of these websites has a google tracker embedded in it, google knows how long you spend on a website. If you load a page then don't interact with it or leave quickly, it assumes you didn't find what you were looking for. The longer you're fumbling around looking for the valuable part of the page (the recipe) the higher the site ranks amongst recipe sites for PageRank, the more hits they'll get in the future.

So - Slowing the current reader down will produce bonus readers later.