The Creator’s Guide to Digital Rights and Copyrighting with Danielle Liss

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here, we’re back with another podcast episode, and this week Bjork is sitting down with Danielle Liss of Liss Legal, who also happens to be one of our Food Blogger Pro experts. If you feel like you’re constantly fighting to protect your original content, you’re not imagining it. Content theft is getting sneakier than ever, especially as AI enters the mix. In this episode, Danielle talks about simplifying your biggest digital defense weapon. The DMCA will show you exactly how to wield the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shut down thieves on every major platform to give you back control. Plus, Danielle shares her innovative strategies for monitoring your content without the burnout. We’re talking clever uses of Google alerts, reverse image searches, and even how to turn AI into your anti-theft ally. That way you can stop stressing about what’s being copied and start focusing on what you love to do, creating content. And now without further ado, I let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Danielle, welcome back to the podcast.

Danielle Liss: Thank you so much. It’s always exciting to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like there’s always something for us to talk about like this really and maybe should be a quarterly check-in, especially now we’ve known you for a long time. It feels like maybe decade, I don’t know, maybe it hasn’t been that long. We were at a conference, I remember years and years ago in Vermont, and you have in this space for a long time like us, you’ve seen a lot of different iterations with it, a lot of different ways that legal concerns come up within the world of content creation and social media, but it feels especially unique now. It feels like the pace and how quickly things are changing is different than it has been before. Does that feel true to you as well?

Danielle Liss: I think the answer there is yes, especially when you think about the overall age of content creation as kind of just being out there in the world. We are talking about a very young industry on its own, but we’re also dealing with, I think that right now it especially feels like it’s just kind of every direction because the tech is changing with the growth in ai, but also the data privacy laws are also changing. So I feel like there’s always something new that is there

Bjork Ostrom: That’s important to talk about. Your quick background won’t go too deep into it. Liss Legal, you work with creators, influencers, people who have online businesses. We work with you. Examples would be we have a contract that we need reviewed or we’re working on shaping up a sponsored content relationship, updating terms of service, things like that. You just know this world and one of the great benefits of working with somebody who knows this world is that you have multiple touchpoint with other people who are doing this. And one of the touch points that we want to talk about today actually specifically came from a listener who wrote in and was like, can you please talk to Danielle about this? Can you have a podcast interview where you talked through this? And then in between the time that this came up, we Pinch of Yum ran into an issue with this where we had somebody who completely scraped the entire pinch of Yum site. And my understanding is then translated that into German and similar colors, similar images, but then transformed those images into being slight iterations off of the image that we had on the site. And these are personal images of Lindsay and I holding our children, and it’s deeply personally unsettling, but also from a business perspective there’s a consideration here as well. So can you explain maybe what you’ve seen different versions of that that have been popping up? Because for those who aren’t familiar, it’s important for us to rehash why this is happening and how it’s happening. And then we’re going to talk about what do you actually do if you come up against this with your content?

Danielle Liss: So I think that this is a variation on things that we’ve seen for a while, and that is people taking content, using it and passing it off as their own. And it’s always hard to say why. My assumption for the Thieves is that they are trying to divert traffic from valid sources or they see that this is successful. So they’re trying to get a piece of that so that they can monetize it. We’ve seen this for years in varying ways. I think that we’ve got new tools, or I shouldn’t say, I should say the thieves, a general umbrella for the folks who aren’t doing this.

Bjork Ostrom: We all have the tools, it’s just that some people are using them in malicious ways the same way.

Danielle Liss: I think that what’s happening is people have different tools and I think that the biggest challenge right now is that the use of tools where they can kind of keep it but make it just a bit different, it makes it harder to find and it makes it so it’s going to be more difficult to find in the same way with a reverse image search or something along those lines. So I think that we are just looking right now, while goals are the same, we are seeing it done in a different way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, my guess is, so in the example of this site for Pinch of Yum, that was, it was replicating Pinch of Yum, translating it into German, transforming the images to be little variations of the image that was on the site. And my guess is remixing. Even if you did a direct translation from German to English, my guess is it would still look a little bit different. I would assume that there’s somebody who’s technically adept who has gone through the process of standing up some system where who knows if this is actually what it was, but they could get to the point where they could put in the name of the URL that they want to go and replicate, and then they could put in the URL that they want to transform it into and then press go. And there are these agents, so you talk about this idea of agentic behavior essentially, which means agents, which essentially means the tool, the AI tool, is able to go and perform a task on its own. And a version of this is if I were to go and say, Hey, tell me the score of the Vikings football game yesterday, technically it would be agentic in the sense that in chat bt it would go out and it would browse the web and it would come back and it would tell me, you could do versions of that now, which are like, go to Zillow and show me all of the houses in St. Paul, Minnesota that are under 500,000. That’s kind of age agentic. It will go out and it will do that. You can also build these systems that are like, go this site and create a copy of that site at this URL, translate it into German, transform all the images and then replicate that site. Now it’s a lot harder to do that, but it is possible. And so part of it is, when I’m looking at this, part of it is deeply personal and it feels thoughtful to see a picture of yourself, but you don’t really look like yourself holding your child that looks like your child but isn’t really your child. And it’s like, oh, that’s weird and feels terrible. And in that way is deeply personal. But I also know that it’s probably somebody who is standing up a system and doing this at scale in order to, like you said, then put some ad network behind it and maybe get a little bit of traffic that from German search engines or whatever it might be. And suddenly by running this little process, then you’re able to make $25 a day, $10 a day, who knows what it is. But because it’s so easy, you could potentially do that 10,000 times and then have 10,000 of these German sites that are a copycat of other food sites each making a few dollars a day, but that equates to thousands of dollars potentially. So you can see behaviorally why people would do this because it can potentially be easy money if you understand the technology. The question for us then as creators is if we come up against this in the case of Pinch of Yum, somebody sent it to us. I don’t know how they came across it. My guess would be probably Pinterest. They clicked on an image, they went and they’re like, wait a minute, this looks kind of similar. So as creators, if we come up against this, maybe we find one on our own that looks like a version of our site has some of the images that look similar or maybe a reader or follower sends it to us. What do we do?

Danielle Liss: That is the big question right now. And I think that I want to preface this by saying AI in terms of the law is very new and very unsettled. We are still seeing a lot of cases work through the courts. We are seeing courts try to adapt existing law to determine what’s going to happen when we are applying AI as a factor within those conversations. So I think that the issue that we have is we’re trying to find something that we can do right now, and I think that the law is unfortunately not a hundred percent there yet. So we then have to look at it and say, okay, in absence of any meaningful AI governance laws yet, and there are countries that are working on them in states that are working on AI governance, I do think that similar to what we saw with data protection and data privacy, we are going to see an influx of laws that are starting to come through and they will give us more ways to take action in a space right now where we don’t have a lot of those tools, particularly in the us, what we are going to then look at is what do we have that’s already available and that’s copyright law. The copyright piece of it is going to be absolutely critical. Just an understanding that you as the creator of this content have certain implicit rights that come along with that and the steps that you can then take to help protect yourself. Where it gets hardest is no one wants to have to spend the money to file a lawsuit to get something taken down. So usually we’re going to talk about DMCA. I know that is going to be, I think the biggest tool that most creators have in order to try to get some of this content removed if it hasn’t been transformed enough to fall into that gray area where it can’t get taken down.

Bjork Ostrom: We have that, we’ve used DMCA for a long time. I don’t know when it came out, but digital, what is it? Digital millennial,

Danielle Liss: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if I remember correctly.

Bjork Ostrom: Copyright Act. Basic idea is you created a piece of digital content, that digital content exists somewhere else. Somebody else used it. You reach out to the platform that is hosting that copyrighted piece of content and say, Hey, this is copyrighted, this is mine. Please take down this other piece of content. So it could be YouTube, it could be Instagram, it could be Pinterest, it could be, we often use it with websites if there’s a direct copy, a site is using our images and you just send over. And I think part of the process for DMCA is like, here’s the original image that is ours and when it was published and here’s the image that they’re using, and then that host is required to take down that piece of content. Is that more or less how it works?

Danielle Liss: So it’s actually from the 90s. So to give you an idea, we’re also talking about a somewhat older piece of legislation under DMCA. It was created as a safe harbor type of law. And what that means is they wanted to give the platforms that were hosting potentially infringing content, an opportunity to take action so that they wouldn’t have liability, so that if they received notice from the copyright owner that there was infringing content and they took it down, then it would be, they wouldn’t be liable for any type of action. It’s not their fault. Because it’s kind of weird. So many of these platforms have user created content, but they are the platform and so they don’t want to be liable for publishing copyrighted material. So my understanding of what you’re saying is they created this as the solution to that to say, okay, if you’re using Facebook.com or Pinterest and copyrighted material, you’re benefiting from that, but you didn’t know it was copyrighted. This is a mechanism for the original copyright holder to let them know that it’s copyrighted. And it can also apply to an actual website host.

Danielle Liss: And what I love about DMCA is that they give you a very particular list of items that you include for a valid DMCA take-down request. And I have a link that I think is a great, just a sample so that you can see an option. It’s from Georgetown, makes it really easy to see what you need to include, but it’s basically, I own this, here’s where it lives, here’s the URL where the content has been placed that it shouldn’t be. And then there’s a couple other things you need. Something about plagiarism, good faith belief, you submit that. Typically step one is where has it actually been published? So if it’s on another website, you are typically going to try to find whoever the host of that website is, if it is on a platform. What I appreciate about the platforms, and I mean like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, they have forms, they have made this, I can only imagine the volume of content that they are dealing with. They have made this as easy as possible by just creating something that you walk through and enter in all of that information so that it can then be processed.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so this is just important to know as a creator who’s publishing things online in general, there’s this DMCA process, we use it all the time in different instances. There is on occasion what we’ll do specifically if somebody has an image and they’re using it on our site, their site, and it’s like actual another, it’s another content creator, usually what we’ll start with in a situation like that is like, Hey, can you just link back to the site? It’s just a nice email. It’s probably more beneficial for us to have a link back to the site, but that’s a little bit of a different bucket. So that’s one solution. In a true situation where there’s somebody who’s using an image or maybe referencing your content or something, you can start by asking for a link. Then there’s the like, oh, you’re just ripping my content off. You copied my post, you copied my images, you pasted it into your site, it’s probably malicious. You’re probably not sharing a cool thing. You’re probably just trying to get traffic by not doing the work. So there’s that. DMC works really well for that, but now there’s this new bucket which I think of it kind of overlaps. Remember when Ed Sheeran was brought to court and people were like, you’re copying my songs. And he’s like, actually, all of these songs are written with the same chord progression. And he famously took his guitar out and went through how he could play any song with a certain chord progression and he ended up winning that. And it feels like with the remixing of content with ai, we’re kind of getting into that territory where it’s like, wait, it’s not the same. In Sheeran’s case, it wasn’t the same song, it kind of sounded similar. You’d look at it and you’d be like, I can see how somebody would think that would kind of be similar, but it’s not the same. And so in your experience, how have companies or platforms responded to similar but not the same images or content being used?

Danielle Liss: So it can depend on fair use. Fair use is a concept in copyright law that will allow people who have not been granted explicit permission to use copyrighted works. And it is typically, best way to think of it is it is for news is really easy news, education, non-commercial usages, criticisms, things along those lines. And when courts look at fair use, they consider one of the biggest things that they consider is what was the purpose and is it transformative? And this idea of transformation is where I think things get really confusing because how much of the image did they take? If you can look at their website and say, you may have made a tiny tweak here, but that’s Lindsay and that’s Bjork and what did you do? I think that you’ve got a bigger argument that they have infringed there, and it might be that we’re easing out of copyright and perhaps into usage of likeness that’s unauthorized and that becomes a lot more hazy. But I think it’s this idea of transformation and then we have to look at everything that you have available. What did they take? Did they take your branding? Did they take your logo? Did they take what we consider as a whole, the trade dress? What is the look and feel of what you are doing? Because that can get, it is really hard. I’ll just say it and be completely candid. It is not easy when they are making some changes to that content.

Bjork Ostrom: And similarly with adherence, actually this is different. And it seems like that’s the hard thing from a governance perspective. When you come up against it and you’re using rules and you’re having to look at what has been established that they can work within the constructs of to say, does this apply to DMCA? Do we need to take this down? It seems the word I’ve been using is squishy. It’s hard to know within the context of governance. It’ll probably get more clear over time, but as soon as it becomes clear within this context, it’s going to become unclear because it’s like technology is always outpacing the legislation that we have to work within the decision making. And so it seems like what we can do is we can try, if we notice one of these sites, we can try the route of DMCA, okay, here’s our site, here’s what it looks like potentially within the submission, make a case for it, leave it up to the platform or the host to make that decision. Is there anything else right now on the governance side that we can do or does that feel like for the most part, the best approach from a governance standpoint before we continue? Let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. Running your business can feel like a constant balancing act between making great content, keeping up with platforms, and actually earning enough to keep doing what you love. That’s where Raptive comes in. They’re the team behind thousands of the Internet’s top creators, including Pinch of Yum, and they help creators grow their traffic, boost their revenue, and protect their content. In an AI-driven world, Raptive creates tailored growth strategies, helping with SEO, email, and audience development. They’re serious about supporting real human made content and now it’s easier than ever to join. If your site gets at least 25,000 monthly page views, you can apply to become part of Raptive’s creator community and get the kind of support that scales as your business grows to learn more or apply visit riv.com. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Danielle Liss: Right now. I do think that DMCA is probably the easiest and least expensive tool that’s available for creators because do I think that there are potentially lawsuit areas? Yes, but I also think that people would probably have to make a significant personal investment to get to that stage. And most people don’t want to be the test case. They want Google to be the test case with their budget. So I think that for DMCA, keep in mind that you have a number of avenues that you can take there. You can go to the host, you can go to the platform where it is extremely obvious that someone is located. You can go to Google if they are linking it in search, you can go to their CDN, like a CloudFlare that has all of the information cached and try to get as much of it removed as you can. If they have monetized, go to Google ads, go to wherever you can to try to hit them because if their whole goal is to try to divert traffic and make money from you, getting it taken off of Google is going to make a big difference. And I believe that most of the time when Google takes action and removes it and they de-indexed, they take it down globally. And what you want to make sure of though is that you have enough of the URLs, they will typically dinex the one URL. So you want to make sure that if it’s in multiple places, send as many as you can. Now, where this becomes a problem is if you’ve got a thousand recipes on your site on different pages. This is a homework type of situation now. So I think that there are a lot of places where you can try to send those DMCA takedowns in an effort to get some sort of action because honestly, if you get it taken down in a place or two, the likelihood is if they are doing this for easy money, you just stopped being easy money. And they do I want them to move on to the next person. No, but they will likely say, okay, we’re not going to play with this website anymore. We are going to go to this other person and try to take their content.

Bjork Ostrom: And I wouldn’t be surprised. We can talk about tools in a little bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if there starts to be some tools that address this. Like anytime at scale with any enterprise, any industry, there’s an issue, it’s an opportunity for somebody to create a tool to help solve for that issue. And the great thing is as easy as it is to copy these, that therefore means probably there’s going to be a tool that’s going to make it easier to spot them. I don’t think it really exists yet. But the other thing that I was going to say, we spoke to this idea of governance. What are the rules? How can we use those rules to combat this DMCA being one of them and using the respective channels that the platform have to submit those. I think the other thing that’s important to point out is there’s also the reality of these being businesses and the businesses have an incentive to create an experience that is advantageous for users at scale and they don’t want a publicity crisis on their hands. And so a lot of these platforms will have the ability to submit information. And what I’m thinking about specifically here is we had and shout out to our contact Jeremy at RIV and some folks who were helping us there. We were just curious and we’re like, Hey, what have you done in situations like this? So we reached out to them and ran it by ’em and two of the things that they pointed out was, Hey, here’s some information on who their advertiser is so you can look to see if that person is running ads, which they probably are because if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be a reason for them to do it. So if you can find the advertiser, you can submit to them and say, Hey, just a heads up, here’s the information. I’m going to put it in front of you as a privately held business or public business, whatever it is, can make a decision as to if this is the type of site that you want to support or not. So in this case it was the advertiser and then also on Pinterest. Pinterest has this link to report something on Pinterest, which you can report an account and there’s a link to that. We can link to that in the show notes. A lot of these platforms will have that as well. And again, it’s the chance for you to put it in front of the platform and say, Hey, this is happening on your platform. I know that maybe legally it’s okay, but do you Pinterest want to be hosting this site? And if not, then they will take that down. And the harder it is for this site to get traffic from Google, Pinterest, Instagram, wherever it is or monetize via ad network, the less likely that people like this will want to do this at scale, but especially like you said for your individual site. And so I do think there’s something around a collective effort to do this. The hard part is it takes time and we’re all limited with the time that we have. Is this something that you do if somebody reached out to you and they were working with you, is it something that you have a process that you can do or obviously somebody on a team could do it If you have team members, do you have any high level advice around somebody who is maybe the main creator how to take it off of their shoulders so it’s not something that they’re doing but still proactively working towards cleaning up?

Danielle Liss: There are services that are out there that will do it. Where it gets trickiest is there are some of the platforms and I can’t remember which ones are, which don’t want things submitted through agents. They want it submitted through the owner. So that can get a little bit tricky in that it’s harder to delegate it if what they want is from the creator,

Bjork Ostrom: The source.

Danielle Liss: But you can absolutely, honestly if there are any VAs listening, I think this is probably a potential niche. Not that I want this to be a niche for somebody, but this is something where whether it is the law firm that you’re working with, a VA that you’re working with, if nothing else, you can find ways to make the process a bit easier in terms of you could have a VA go in and just make a list of all of the URLs on your site and then the URLs on their site so that it’s a much easier process once you’ve got to start the submissions. But I think there are a lot of ways that you can start to streamline it and I hate that we even have to talk about this. I don’t want people to have to spend their time and money on it, but of course if you ignore it, then there’s the potential that you are losing money because if they are diverting your traffic, that is directly going to impact you financially.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great. You had mentioned some tools and even I know before we started you said you have somebody who kind of specializes in some of this. Can you talk about what those are that we could maybe think about using, knowing that they’re maybe not quite there yet, but something that we could just be aware of if it was something that we wanted? I don’t even know. Is it monitoring to see if this happens or how would it work?

Danielle Liss: The first is probably one that I think I have it from my blog that’s been shut down for 10 years is basic Google alerts. So have something where you are looking, whether it is your name or if you have a catchphrase that you use alerts that are coming in so that you can get a sense if people are using things that they shouldn’t be. And sometimes it can be incredibly frustrating because I can only imagine for pinch of yum how many times Pinch and Yum will come up, but it’s one of the easiest tools to use still. I think there are still good reverse image tools like reverse image search. TinEye is also good to help you, but then that gets tricky because then it depends on how much has been changed.

Bjork Ostrom: How close is

Danielle Liss: In that image, will it still recognize that it started from yours? I do a lot of work in the technology space and work with a lot of AI-type tools, and I asked her, Do you know of anything out there yet? And she said, not really, and what seems to be the best options are the plagiarism detectors, the stuff that they created for teachers to check kids’ reports, they were taking them from ChatGPT. So there’s a number of tools out there that do that. I think Grammarly has an AI checker option if you’re using it for a spell check on your content. A couple of other ones that I’ve found are CopyScapes, Copyscape, sorry, and then CopyLeaks. The other piece of this that can be a little bit tricky is I think we are starting to see some tools that are probably going to be good for the type of work that we are asking the tools to do. So right now a lot of was something sighted, was something done in ai. The other one that I saw that was decent was visual ping. For some folks where I think this may be most challenging is these are subscription tools. So these are things that you are going to need to take a look at what the financial aspect of those tools is because I believe that a lot of them will have limitations on the number of pages. So if you’ve got, let’s say you’ve got your top 10 biggest traffic generating recipes, your homepage and maybe a couple of others that might work. But if you’re trying to do just a general overview of thousands of pages on your site to see what’s out there, that may start to become kind of pricey to monitor. So my hope is that we are going to start seeing number one more tools that are geared more specifically toward the type of searches that we are aiming for here. You’re not just trying to figure out if something was written with ai, you’re trying to figure out if something you wrote was then stolen and rewritten with ai. So it’s similar but not quite there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s entering that information in and then having it monitor for AI iterations of that, which feels like uniquely difficult tool honestly probably a version of that will come

Danielle Liss: Use AI. Use AI for this. I think that you could easily go into chat GPT and it’s going to depend, you might have to play around with your inputs quite a bit on this, but ask it, Hey, this is a really popular recipe. Do you see anything out there that’s similar to this? Do you see anything and you might get there. I think that AI can be so tricky to get the results that you’re looking for. It’s not as exact as a search engine would be, but I do think that there is the potential where it might give you, if there is somebody who is really kind of in your face with the way that they have taken your content, it might be a way to help to locate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I can just share for people who are interested, I kind of talked a little bit about it, kind of our approach with how we’ve done it, what we try and balance is how much do you want to try and monitor this proactively as a part of your day-to-day kind of recurring part of your process versus proactively create things moving forward? We don’t know the right answer to it, but in this case with this site that this German site, it felt like, okay, let’s try and figure out what we should do with this. So first step was we don’t really have a process. It was the first time we came up with an AI version of the site came up against that, and so part of it was just like, what do we do? This conversation is a part of it. We reached out to Raptive, Hey, have you guys ever seen this? What do you do about it? I think probably what the plan will be moving forward is what’s the minimal amount that we can do to start that might solve the problem and then making a decision on how far down we want to go. And I think the minimal amount that we would do is initially just DMCA, Hey, here’s this site, here’s some examples of how it’s very similar to our current site. Send that off, see if there’s something that comes from it. If not, I think the second step would be going through some of the main platforms and those are probably the ones that would be linked on the actual website. I think in this case it was a Facebook and it was a Pinterest account and submitting the forms for those reporting an issue. Hey, this account is, you had used that phrase, image likeness or whatever,

Danielle Liss: Infringing

Bjork Ostrom: And seeing if anything comes from that. And then maybe also the advertiser informing the advertiser, Hey, just as a heads up, it looks like this is an AI version of the site. Would there be anything else that would be a relatively light lift that people could do or does that feel like, and then maybe at that point it’s put a little note and then check in on it in three months to see if it’s still around and then do it all again. Anything else that you’d add?

Danielle Liss: I would say potentially the DMCA is to Google as well because if you can get them de-indexed, that’s probably a nice way to go about it. If you can, anything that you can do, whether you’re cutting off the traffic or cutting off the money, that is really going to be the biggest things that you’re looking at. Of course, just cutting it off on its own, but assuming those don’t work, try to cut off the traffic and try to cut off the money.

Bjork Ostrom: And I would say to go back to that point of people are using AI to create this, which is a negative, what are the ways that you could use AI to combat it, which would be the positive. This would be a great use case of a custom GPT or a project in ChatGPT that you use, and you give it the instructions. You go through the work one time and you say, anytime that I come up with a site like this, I want you to pull the URLs from the site and then pull URLs from my site, look through them and come up with the most similar versions of those URLs and then craft the answers that I need for submitting this to Google Craft the answers that I need to submit this on the Pinterest site. There are ways that you can automate this so when you do run into it, the lift that it takes to go through this process is light compared to what it was five years ago, which maybe you are having to do a little bit more of the manual work with that so that depending on how often that comes up for us, this is just the first time and so we’re kind of figuring it out. If it comes up more often, it might be something that we would spin up a custom GPT for and kind of have a light process around to make it as easy as possible moving forward. So super helpful to talk through this. I think it’s one of those things that we’ll see more and more unfortunately, but nice to know that there are some ways that we can think strategically about going forward with it and my encouragement to people would be to go through that process to try and keep things tidy around the web, not having your likeness used in other places, but to not get so caught up in it that you spend eight hours of your day instead of creating your next piece of content, just only doing this type of work. It can be easy for it to take up a lot of mental real estate, but as much as possible take care of it, move on, maybe revisit to see if it’s still there, go through the process again a few months later, but hopefully not to get too tied up in it. So anything else that you’d say about this that would be important for people to know or consider?

Danielle Liss: I really think you nailed it because this is going, we are at the start of this as an issue and I think that when you think about however many years ago it was everything feels like a year in internet time is like a decade in normal time. So I’m thinking this was 20 years ago and it’s like that was three years ago.

Bjork Ostrom: That was February of this year,

Danielle Liss: Right, exactly. That wasn’t even a month ago. Oh, okay. So if you think about the first time you heard of sites just being duplicated or scraped or whatever, it is going to be very similar, just feels worse. I don’t know how else to explain it. This feels worse because especially like what you saw with Pinch of Yum, they have taken personal photos and manipulated those. This feels different than if somebody just photoshopped your watermark off of the image. So I think that the idea of just try to take a breath, take a step back and just remember you’ve got these tools, try to go through them from there. The basic things that I think are going to come into play for people, copyright and knowledge of your copyrights is absolutely critical. If you get to a point where you do not feel like you know what to do, please talk to a lawyer and they can walk you through what your rights might be. If you haven’t trademarked for your brand name or your logo, consider whether or not that makes sense because sometimes if you had somebody who’s stolen your brand name and your logo on this mirrored site, you might have them then for copyright infringement and trademark infringement. It’s kind of like a dual way to go after them and also think about how you want to address it in your terms of service, your terms of service right now, that’s a very squishy area of law too, to use that phrase again, but it is a lot of people want to rely on what the terms of service say in terms of you can’t use my content, you can’t do this, you can’t use it to train ai, you can’t use it for the following things. There has been, I know of one big case that went through and it was X slash Twitter where the court said, yeah, you had it in your terms, but It’s still a copyright law issue. So I think that the more places that you’ve kind of created those boundaries for yourself and that you have a checklist ChatGPT always wants to create a checklist, so let them create a checklist for you of what should I do if somebody takes my content and they’ll give you the DMCA info. The other thing I want people to remember is that DMCA is a US-based law. People sometimes get incredibly frustrated if they find out that the host or some other aspect of whomever’s involved with it is based outside of the us. There are a lot of companies who will still respond, even though it’s US based, they will still respond to this type of infringement claim. So it is still worth trying. And again, if you can’t get it through with the host, try the registrar for the domain, try the CDN, try whatever options you have, and the bigger the company, the more likely they are to have the forms that will sort of ease that process for you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. One of the things I talk about is as our businesses grow, we want to do more and more routing of the things that we don’t want to spend our time doing and have these experts in our corner that we can go to. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, you are a great resource for all things legal. Can you talk, Danielle, real quick as we close out, how people could work with you and reach out and connect with you if they want to have you in their corner as a content creator?

Danielle Liss: Absolutely. I offer a complimentary consult to anybody who reaches out. I usually like to try to find out more about their business and then see where it might make sense for me to assist. If it’s contracts, website terms, privacy is its own separate conversation right now, or if people just have a situation that comes up and you say, I just need a half hour’s worth of legal advice, please, absolutely. We figure out what that looks like. So I am always happy to talk to folks. I hear from a lot of folks who are like, I heard about you on for the Blocker Pro, and I’m like, yay. So I always feel really comfortable knowing that we can work through whatever the issues are, even if it’s not something that’s going to be a million dollar lawsuit judgment in your favor, I at least want you to know what your next steps are going to be if something like this comes up.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Best way to do that would be list legal.com and then the contact page or reach out to you directly.

Danielle Liss: Yep. LissLegal.com on the contact page, [email protected], whatever’s easiest.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Danielle. Really appreciate it. And my guess is there’s going to be more of these conversations down the line, so we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are rapidly approaching the Thanksgiving holidays and all of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales that accompany it, we wanted to let you know that we will be holding our end-of-year Cyber Monday sale, and it starts on Monday, December 1st. During our regular Cyber Monday sale, you can get $100 off of an annual membership to Food Blogger Pro bringing the cost down to just $250 for the whole year. And we’ll also be offering a sale on our monthly membership for just $22 a month. But if you sign up for our wait list now, you’ll get an even bigger discount $150 off an annual membership, which means you’ll get a whole year of being a Food Blogger Pro member for just $200. That’s 55 cents a day, and all of these sale prices will continue every single time your membership renews. So here’s what you need to do. Sign up for the waitlist at food blogger pro.com/cyber-monday–2025. The link will also be in our show notes, and you can sign up for that waitlist between now and Sunday, November 30th. To get access to this exclusive wait list deal, you’ll want to check your inbox on Monday, December 1st for the special discount code and join before 11:59 PM Eastern Time on December 1st to lock in $150 off. If you miss the wait list, you’ll still have access to the regular Cyber Monday sale at the same URL through Wednesday December 3rd at 11:59 PM So again, head to foodbloggerpro.com/cyber-monday–2025 or check out the link in our show notes to sign up for the wait list or to get access to our regular Cyber Monday sale. This is an awesome sale. You won’t want to miss it, and we can’t wait to welcome you into the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you have any questions, you can email me at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to help you out. Have a great week.