Copyright Confusion

If you are a member of Ravelry, you are probably nauseatingly aware of the numerous threads beating pattern copyright issues into small, but terrifying, legal molecules. I dipped into several of these bizarrely acrimonious exchanges and agree that, if you want a designer's pattern, you should buy it from the creator or publisher.

It's clearly a Bad Thing to post extant patterns on a photo- or file-sharing site so the general public can have them for free. It's also a Bad Thing to copy a design and slap your own name on it.

I do not agree that copyright violations fall into the same category as, say, homicide, arson, and lobbing bombs into elementary schools.

For those who have not had the experience of perusing the copyright discussions, I have, for your reading pleasure, distilled their essence into the following fleegleized Copyright Statement. Please make a note of it.

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If you purchase this pattern, you may knit a single garment, but said garment may not be sold, loaned, donated, photographed, scanned, or sent to the dry cleaners.

You may not exhibit or wear said garment without a prominently displayed copyright attribution on the front, back, sleeves, and buttons (if applicable). If the knitted item does not have garment parts, the copyright attribution will need to be displayed on the front, back, sides, and interior of same.

You may not discard, give away, or lose either the pattern, or the garment/item, and when you proceed to the Great Knitting Emporium In The Sky, the pattern and garment/item must be incinerated in a sealed container. You may, however, choose to be incinerated with said pattern and/or garment/item, provided that you do not have an electronic greeting embedded in your urn, gravestone, or mausoleum.

If you find this pattern/garment/item in an airplane seat pocket, you may not glance at it. You must report the find to the pilot, who must immediately land the plane and incinerate said pattern on the runway before proceeding to the final destination. You will be further obliged to obliviate the flight attendants, passengers, and other crew members who might have glanced at said pattern while you were slipping it under the cockpit door.

And finally, should your house be distributed via tornado, hurricane, or explosive device, you are responsible for locating both the pattern and garment/item before it can be discovered, read, or worn by a third party.

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If you think the above disclaimer is silly and that copyright law is unambiguous, ponder the following:

If you purchase a locked Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Lit e-book, you'll discover that the Reading Aloud feature is disabled. According to the publishers I queried, if the Reading Aloud feature were enabled for the sight-impaired, then a sighted person might overhear the audio, which is clearly a copyright violation. On the other hand, it is not a copyright violation for two sighted people to simultaneously read the e-book.

If you buy the audio version of the book, it's perfectly fine to play it on your stereo, where an entire family or group of friends can listen in. Furthermore, if you purchase a paper copy of the same book, it's perfectly ok to read it aloud.

You may read the e-book on a limited number of machines (in the case of an encrypted PDF, that means only the machine on which you downloaded the file), but the paper copy may be given away, donated, or loaned out until it falls apart.

If these scenarios leave you confused, then you might want to ponder the concept of public libraries, which allow you to read or listen to copyrighted material without actually paying for it.

For the record, here's how I stand regarding copyright of my own material, designs, concepts, and electronic/audio renditions of same, whether they appear on this blog, are inscribed on a marble stele, or delicately painted on the back of a hamster.

You may do anything you wish with any material of mine that you find on this blog--use it for classes; print out enough copies to paper the Great Wall of China; distribute it electronically; and sell, exhibit, or give away as many finished pieces as you like--all without asking my permission. The only thing I ask is that you credit me, where applicable. If you don't credit me, I won't go after you, but I will think of you ever after as a Really Rude Person.

I don't make any money from this blog or the designs and concepts contained therein. I am not going to waste my income or time pursuing Really Rude People. I would rather be knitting.

Speaking of knitting, I have nothing to show you this week. I am in the middle of three shawls and they don't look much different than they did the last time I posted pictures, except there's more of them on the needles than on the balls/cones.

I won't post the picture of Roy's half-finished socks, because they bear an uncanny resemblance to the current cover of Knitter's magazine, complete with lime green and hot pink stripes. The yarn doesn't look like that at all (it's a pretty, pastel rainbow blend), so I figure I must have left the socks on top of the cover and somehow, the virulent cover photo perfused the sock. Be careful where you leave your knitting.