When I entered the knitting blogosphere I started to learn about designers, designs and the fact that (obviously) some people make a living out of knitting. To me this came not as a total surprise, but it was all the aspects this community that provoked me to think more about it and develop a sense of magnitude of this issue.
As I mentioned in one of my older posts, I learned to knit from my mother who has a very ‘basic’ attitude to knitting. Patterns come from her head and she can play with them in her mind, no need to write anything down or read it from a magazine or book. Of course, she is limited by her knowledge of techniques, so her patterns (or ideas) will be repeptition of the stuff she knows and the stuff she saw somewhere else. Of course I inherited much of her attitude and for quite a long time took it as ‘normal’.
I learned quite some things from books, knitting included. And I must say I always considered them as a helpful resource, as a starting point for my own ventures. I also made quite some projects from knitting magazines (mainly in high school, I was buying Burda and Sabrine and similar German do-it-yourself publications).
And now I stumble across people selling their patterns on-line, some of them offering them for free but quite a lot of them considering them as something private, something they own, because they created it. There are big names in the knitting world, important bloggers and people who should be respected for their ideas and contribution to the world of knitting. Some of their work is truly amazing and every credit should be given to them for those things. But as it is in this world, some of the patterns of those big names are, to be honest, very basic and very simple and not that special at all.
So, I started to wonder, is it wrong if I make a cardigan which is very similar to a cardigan designed by Kim Hargreaves? Is it wrong if I make a scarf using a combination of seed stitch and wine-leaves pattern just like they suggest in xy book? They certainly did not make up the seed stitch nor the wine-leaves pattern, since they have been around for quite some time, several centuries, at least.
It’s not only me who has these doubts. Just a couple of days ago I read a post on this theme on the Half assed knit blog and quite samo time ago Dances with wool also had a post related to it.
Where is the limit between creativity and copyright?
I have some opinions about it, and I’ll be happy to hear any of your ideas.
(Tthis post will be continued in couple of days…)
