How a Copyright Threat Backfired on TikTok

Ashley stood in a Walmart parking lot in Nebraska and cried into her phone camera. She had been making cake pops for a couple of weeks. A full-time job kept her days busy, so the baking happened on the side, the kind of hobby that turns into a small business one Fruity Pebbles cake pop at a time. Then a bigger creator, Kaity of Cakes by Kaity, accused her of stealing a recipe and threatened legal action. "She's fucking made a whole video about me threatening to sue me," Ashley said through her tears, which is a sentence nobody expects to say over dessert.

The recipe at the center of the meltdown is for Fruity Pebbles cake pops, a treat made of cereal, cake mix, and frosting, the kind of thing bakers have been remixing on the internet for years. Ashley said she'd been inspired by ratios and techniques Kaity had already shared publicly, then improvised the rest herself with ingredients already in her kitchen. She tagged Kaity in the post, a gesture that is usually considered good manners, not evidence in the court of TikTok.

Ironically, nobody thought to Google the recipe.

Post Consumer Brands, the company behind Fruity Pebbles, has had its own official recipe for Fruity Pebbles cereal cake pops posted on its website for well over a year, laid out step by step for anyone with a mixing bowl. No one at the cereal company needed to weigh in on a TikTok feud to settle the underlying legal question. The recipe Kaity claimed as protected territory had been sitting in plain view on a corporate site the whole time.

Once Ashley's tearful video spread, other bakers and commenters started making the same point from a different angle: copyright law protects the specific wording and creative packaging of a cookbook, not the underlying combination of cake mix, frosting, and cereal. A baker who has published two cookbooks of her own said as much in the comments, and a chef-creator's reply, stating plainly that recipes are not copyrighted, became one of the most liked responses to the whole exchange.

V Spehar of Under the Desk News made the same case with more authority behind it. Spehar spent years as director of impact for the James Beard Foundation before becoming a news creator, and opened a video addressed straight to Ashley: "You can't get sued for making cake pops because recipes cannot be copyrighted."

Spehar walked through the same legal line other bakers had drawn, that a recipe's ingredient list and steps sit outside copyright protection while the writing and photography built around it do not, which is why so many online recipes arrive wrapped in a story nobody asked for. On the Walmart parking lot breakdown, Spehar's response was blunter: "No shame in that game."

Spehar also offered a longer history of the cake pop, tracing it to an earlier cheesecake-style version by chef David Burke in the 1990s and further back to traditions of fried or decorated scrap-dough desserts in Central Africa and France. That timeline is Spehar's own telling and isn't corroborated elsewhere. The version of the story most food writers document credits Atlanta blogger Angie Dudley, known as Bakerella, with popularizing the modern cake pop in February 2008 and demonstrating it on the Martha Stewart Show that April, adding the stick along the way. Whichever history holds up, Spehar's closing line cut through the noise: "Nobody owns food."

Kaity later acknowledged the distinction herself, saying she'd conflated protecting her cookbook as a whole with owning the recipe inside it. The internet did what it does when it decides someone big has leaned on someone small. Larger creators, including Snooki, publicly sided with Ashley. Followers moved. One account put Ashley's count at roughly 61,000 before the dispute and past 350,000 within days, crediting the jump to viewers rallying behind her once the legal threat went public. The same account reported Kaity losing followers and brand deals as the backlash built, though that figure comes from a single source and hasn't been independently confirmed.

Kaity apologized twice, the second version reading as more direct than the first, telling Ashley she hadn't led with kindness. Ashley accepted it in writing, wishing Kaity and her family well. Kaity's reply ran three words: thank you for hearing me out.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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