Anyway

There was quite a lot of dis­cus­sion about copy­right issues in the com­ments to my knit­ted cush­ion piece; this is an import­ant enough sub­ject that it deserves its own blog post­ing. Oblig­at­ory dis­claim­er here.

The issue was wheth­er a knit­ting pat­tern can be copy­righted. I believe that the com­plete pat­tern with all the words can be copy­righted in the same way as all my oth­er post­ings are copy­righted. If it’s ori­gin­al con­tent that I cre­ated, and I haven’t assigned the copy­right to any­one else, then I have the copy­right. So the main ques­tion is, can the straight­for­ward descrip­tion of the stitches (i.e., the “k1, p1” bit) be copy­righted? Mark claims it can­’t, because you can­’t copy­right the design and stitches. A related issue is wheth­er you can impose licens­ing con­di­tions on someone mak­ing the art­icle described in the pat­tern (in the case of the cush­ion I designed, giv­ing attribution). 

Tra­di­tion­ally knit­ting has been about people mak­ing vari­ations on known ideas. Eliza­beth Zim­mer­man, one of the knit­ting gurus, used the word “unven­ted” to describe tech­niques that she dis­covered. She was con­vinced that someone else had prob­ably dis­covered the tech­nique long ago, but not writ­ten it down, so what she was doing was re-invent­ing, or “unvent­ing”. She also encour­aged people to make vari­ations on pat­terns, to make things their own. How­ever, there are the leg­al aspects of copy­right to con­sider. In the US, a knit­ting pat­tern falls under the Visu­al Arts cat­egory for copy­right as long as it fol­lows the basic rules. Copy­right pro­tects “ori­gin­al works of author­ship” that are fixed in a tan­gible form of expres­sion. In the UK, I assume knit­ting pat­terns would fall under the writ­ten work cat­egory, as it includes instruc­tion manu­als (a knit­ting pat­tern is argu­ably an instruc­tion manu­al). For Cana­dian law, it’s easi­er to refer to the web site writ­ten by an IPR law­yer. From there I read Sec­tion 5(1) of the Copy­right Act spe­cifies that copy­right sub­sists in every “ori­gin­al” lit­er­ary, dra­mat­ic, music­al and artist­ic work. So my cush­ion pat­tern, since it is ori­gin­al in that sense, does have copy­right pro­tec­tion. Includ­ing the arrange­ment of the stitches (or the basic “k1, p1” stuff). The stitch pat­terns on their own, the mod­ules that I built the cush­ion pat­tern out of, which are tra­di­tion­al, aren’t copy­righted, of course. It’s my arrange­ment of them to form the cush­ion pat­tern that is.

The oth­er ques­tion is what con­di­tions I can impose on someone who wants to copy the pat­tern, or make art­icles from it. In my pat­tern, I spe­cific­ally said people should­n’t copy the pat­tern, but should link to it instead. And that they can use the pat­tern to make art­icles, even for sale, as long as they give me attri­bu­tion for the pat­tern. Most free knit­ting pat­terns con­tain the con­di­tion that the per­son not make the art­icle for sale, but I decided I did­n’t object to that. 

From all my read­ing, it’s per­fectly allow­able (note I’m not say­ing any­thing about the mor­al aspects here) to impose such con­di­tions on any­one wish­ing to copy the pat­tern or use it to make a cush­ion. You should not simply assume that because you have per­mis­sion to make a copy of the sweat­er or afghan by fol­low­ing the pat­tern, you also have per­mis­sion to deal with that work in any way, for example by selling what you made. In the knit­ting industry, it’s very com­mon for people to say that the res­ult­ing art­icle may not be sold, and this is basic­ally a con­tract that the knit­ter agrees to in using the pattern. 

In fact, the industry norm is that items made from any pat­tern that the knit­ter buys or down­loads (even free pat­terns) may only be made for the knit­ter or as gifts. So in the absence of a copy­right notice on the pat­tern, it could be argued that those would be the implied con­di­tions of use. This is not uni­ver­sally accep­ted; here’s the start­ing point to one long dis­cus­sion I read where this point was argued back and forth. I note, how­ever, that even the per­son arguing that the knit­ted art­icles should be able to be sold also argued that cred­it should be giv­en to the designer. 

References

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf http://www.copyright.gov/register/va-examples.html https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20080906010247/https://www.ipo.gov.uk/copy.htm http://www.girlfromauntie.com/copyright/ http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall03/FEATcopyright.html http://community.livejournal.com/knitting/8179698.html

Disclaimer

I am not a law­yer, I don’t know any law­yers per­son­ally who deal with the issue of copy­right in knit­ting, and thus although I have read quite a lot about the sub­ject, any detailed ques­tions you may have should be taken to someone who is prop­erly qual­i­fied. And all of this leg­al stuff does vary with the country/state/province you live in. Most of my read­ing has been based on Cana­dian and US law; the laws in oth­er coun­tries may vary con­sid­er­ably. I do hope that people who know more about the sub­ject than I do will comment.