Year: 2007

City Mayhem

Today was my turn to take the boy to his soc­cer camp; it also turned out to be the day after the police shot someone on a main street. The afore­said street was com­pletely closed down for a block which caused a cer­tain amount of traffic hav­oc. I got a close-up look at the deser­ted street while inch­ing past the yel­low “Police — do not cross” tape (it’s on the usu­al route to the camp). When I got to the camp, I found more chaos in the park­ing lot, since two-thirds of the lot was blocked off for shoot­ing some film (a com­mon occur­rence in Van­couver). I finally made it back home again, only to find the cat in the back yard play­ing with an almost-dead rat. With the cur­rent strike in Van­couver includ­ing the garbage pick-up ser­vices, the rat pop­u­la­tion has exploded, so I don’t actu­ally object to the cats catch­ing rats, but I don’t really want to have to watch. 

Sum­mer in the city, I guess.

Knitting and Copyright

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.

Home from Oxford

As usu­al, the trip to the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford was excel­lent. I learned a lot and met some inter­est­ing people and had fun too, even though I’ve decided that two trips to Europe, with a one-year-old, in 26 days, is a little too much travel in a short peri­od of time. The XML Sum­mer School had day­care, oth­er­wise I really would­n’t have been able to cope. I think the baby enjoyed the trip as well; she made lots of new friends and I star­ted call­ing her “Prin­cess” because of the way she waved and simpered. I am extremely grate­ful for all the work the Sum­mer School organ­isers and the day­care people put in to make the trip as easy as possible.

I did­n’t see a lot of the flood­ing and was only tan­gen­tially affected by it; I do have memor­ies of the water slosh­ing around on the arrivals floor in Ter­min­al 1 when I arrived on the morn­ing of Fri­day 20th July and the attempts people were mak­ing to stop it going down into the base­ment where the Tube and the tun­nels to get to oth­er parts of the air­port are loc­ated. The tun­nel out of Heath­row was down to one lane and it was closed in the oth­er dir­ec­tion. I was­n’t sur­prised to learn later that sev­er­al flights had been cancelled.

Although in the centre of Oxford, where we were, there were few signs of the floods (a couple of roads closed off), sur­round­ing areas were strongly affected. One friend who cycled in to meet us at the pub crawl on Wed­nes­day found it sur­real that his area was full of sand­bags and people pan­ick­ing about the rising ground­wa­ter, while a short bike ride away people were going shop­ping, going to the pub, and gen­er­ally behav­ing the way they would without the floods.

The punt­ing was can­celled of course, the Cher­well was just too high and too fast for it to be safe; there was a cer­tain amount of nervous­ness about los­ing a del­eg­ate or two.

Punts on the Cherwell River by the Boathouse

Before the Sum­mer School star­ted, I met up with a friend on the Sunday for lunch. We went to The Fishes in North Hink­sey, a cute little place with a ver­andah and a play­ground and a pic­nic area. Which would have been great for the baby to crawl around in, if it had­n’t been under a cer­tain amount of water at the time.

flooded_playground flooded_picnic_area

All in all, I was quite glad to see the sun again when I got home to Van­couver, and to be happy we don’t live on a flood plain.

Off to Oxford

I’m leav­ing for Oxford this after­noon; haven’t had much time for blog­ging in the last few days, what with recov­er­ing from the Ber­lin trip and get­ting ready for this one. Not to men­tion cop­ing with an extremely clingy tod­dler, who gets jeal­ous of Mummy’s laptop, and the phone, and any­one who dares get in between us. Wish me luck on the flight — she’ll either be a per­fect little angel because she has me to her­self or (and this is more likely) drive me com­pletely bonkers.

Definition of Open Standards

Rick Jel­liffe, who’s been in the middle of lots of stand­ards efforts, writes on the sub­ject at Is our idea of “Open Stand­ards” good enough? Veri­fi­able vendor-neut­ral­ity. Worth read­ing, although he does make the assump­tion that the term “open stand­ards” means “cre­ated by some stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion”. Although that’s a tempt­ing defin­i­tion, and the one used by a lot of people (and the one I hap­pen to prefer), it’s not the only defin­i­tion that I’ve seen. I’ve seen three main cat­egor­ies of defin­i­tions of the term “open stand­ard” when applied to some specification:

  • Any­one can read the spe­cific­a­tion (usu­ally without pay­ing); often applied to pro­pri­et­ary spe­cific­a­tions which are treated as de facto standards.
  • Cre­ated in a stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion that allows any­one to take part who has rel­ev­ant expert­ise or can pay the appro­pri­ate dues.
  • Able to be used in any open source pro­jects (i.e., there are restric­tions on the types of licenses that can be used).

Recog­nising that lots of people use the term “open stand­ard” to mean dif­fer­ent things, the Liberty Alli­ance recently pub­lished what that term means in the con­text of Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines. It’s called the Liberty Alli­ance Com­mit­ment to Open Stand­ards and it’s a very brief doc­u­ment out­lining a set of con­di­tions for those spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines (yes, the doc­u­ment talks about tech­nic­al spe­cific­a­tions but really it applies to oth­er types of doc­u­ments as well). The top item in the list of con­di­tions to be an open stand­ard, to answer Rick­’s main point that rather than talk­ing “open stand­ard­s” we need to be talk­ing as much of “verifiable vendor-neut­ral­ity”, is can­not be con­trolled by any single per­son or entity with any ves­ted interests.

I dis­agree with Rick when he says that only ISO is truly vendor-neut­ral since only nation­al bod­ies vote, as those nation­al bod­ies could in the­ory be swayed by vendors. What you really want is to bal­ance the needs of all parties (vendors, users, gov­ern­ments), but that’s dif­fi­cult to attain in any organ­iz­a­tion. You need not only an organ­iz­a­tion that is set up to allow for input from all those stake­hold­ers (to pro­duce stand­ards that are evolved and man­aged in a trans­par­ent pro­cess open to all inter­ested parties and approved through due pro­cess by rough con­sensus among par­ti­cipants) but you also need to have enough par­ti­cipants who are inter­ested in the end res­ult, and have the appro­pri­ate expert­ise. And you need a com­pet­ent chair for each com­mit­tee, of course.