Category: Hobbies

Hob­bies such as knit­ting, crochet, house renov­a­tion, garden­ing, reading

Ravelry

I finally got my Ravelry invite today. I got on the wait­ing list about a month ago, so it did­n’t take long. I spent a few minutes pok­ing around, though I will have to be care­ful as it could prove to be an immense time-sink for me, with all the dis­cus­sion about knit­ting and crochet. There’s even a group for KnitML there, which I had­n’t heard of before.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing Ravelry to Face­book, as well. Sur­face impres­sions: com­pletely dif­fer­ent crowd, they don’t ask for any inform­a­tion when you sign up except for an email address, user­name, and pass­word. Of course, you can add info such as birth­day or where you live to your pro­file, but it’s not needed. Lots of links to sites out­side of Ravelry, thus the site feels much more open to the rest of the world than Face­book. And maybe because it’s more focussed, it will be more appeal­ing long-term (there already seems to be quite a lot of Face­book ennui out there in the blogosphere). 

If you’re a keen knit­ter or cro­chet­er, don’t be put off by the fact you have to join a wait­ing list; it does­n’t take long to get the invite and it looks like a worth­while resource. One neat item: the yarn list­ing includes people’s destash info.

Market Choice

Here’s a fas­cin­at­ing piece dis­cuss­ing how fixed prices on books in Ger­many was actu­ally push­ing prices down (con­trary to eco­nom­ic the­ory), while sup­port­ing a wide range of booksellers.

When I was last in Ger­many, apart from my usu­al beef about Ger­man book­sellers not tak­ing cred­it cards, I found no reas­on to com­plain about the range of books that was avail­able. Chil­dren’s books are more expens­ive than I’m used to here, but a lot of that is also because most chil­dren’s books are only avail­able in hard­back and thus inher­ently more expens­ive. Paper­backs seemed reas­on­ably priced in gen­er­al, and of good typo­graph­ic­al quality. 

Peter Brant­ley has some ques­tions at the end of his piece, which I think can be applied not only to books, but also tele­vi­sion, news, indeed many aspects of what is com­monly called “cul­ture”. When the mass media and mass enter­tain­ment industry are des­per­ately try­ing to increase rat­ings by cater­ing to the fads and whims of the mass mar­ket, is this a “race to the bot­tom” as has been pos­tu­lated? Is the long tail suf­fi­cient to enable people with diverse interests (and that’s all of us at some stage or anoth­er) to have those needs met, those itches scratched? How do people find those groups, if they don’t know what to look for? 

Choice is import­ant, know­ing that you have choices is even more import­ant. It’s a bit like free speech.

Small Gods

Terry Pratch­ett’s Small Gods is a good place to start in the pan­theon of the Dis­cworld books. That’s the reas­on we chose it, rather than one of the many oth­ers, to read in book club. There are a couple of places where hav­ing read some of the oth­er books would give some addi­tion­al depth (the lib­rar­i­an, or Death), but it’s not neces­sary for the enjoy­ment of the story. There are a lot of Dis­cworld books. To get some­thing of a pic­ture of how they’re all related, try the Read­ing Order Guide (link from Boing­Bo­ing).

I remem­ber read­ing Dis­cworld books when I was study­ing phys­ics, but then some­how got out of the habit (prob­ably because they wer­en’t read­ily avail­able in Ger­many where I was liv­ing at the time). So I was glad to be reminded of just how good a read they can be. Small Gods is a par­ody of reli­gions, gods, and inquis­i­tions. It tells the story of a small god (the defin­i­tion being one that does­n’t have many fol­low­ers and there­fore does­n’t have much power) and his sym­bi­os­is with the one true believ­er. Along the way, Pratch­ett neatly pokes fun at organ­ized reli­gion, the Inquis­i­tion, philo­soph­ers, and lots of oth­er things. It’s the sort of book you read for the snide asides as much as the storyline. It can be read at lots of levels; you can just read and enjoy the story or think about the deep­er implic­a­tions for com­par­at­ive reli­gions. We had fun dis­cuss­ing the rela­tion­ship between Om and Brutha in terms of who needed whom the most. Both Om and Brutha change and learn dur­ing the book’s events; Om becom­ing less venge­ful (although while he’s in tor­toise form there’s not much he can do to carry out any venge­ful actions) and more thought­ful through being mal­treated (run­ning gag: “there’s good eat­ing on a tor­toise” with­in earshot of him) and through Brutha’s bar­gain­ing power (he is, after all, the reas­on that Om is sen­tient although it takes him a while to fig­ure that out).

All in all, worth try­ing if you haven’t already, even if you don’t usu­ally read fantasy or sci­ence fic­tion. Just don’t blame me if you get hooked on the series.

Knitting and XML

Eve’s XML and knit­ting ana­logy got me thinking.

You can think of a writ­ten knit­ting pat­tern as being the schema, with a set of instruc­tions, just like the schem­a’s con­tent mod­el. Then each knit­ted item you make that con­forms to that knit­ting pat­tern is like the doc­u­ment instance that con­forms to the schema. Schem­as can be restrict­ive or allow lots of instance struc­ture vari­ations, as can knit­ting pat­terns. And, to tie it into my pre­vi­ous post on knit­ting and copy­right, a schema can be copy­righted (and often is). The ana­logy does have a few prob­lems when you start try­ing to fig­ure out the rela­tion­ship of the set of tags in a doc­u­ment instance and the con­tent with­in those tags; if you think of the knit and purl stitches as being the ele­ments, then the yarn would be the con­tent. Except for, yarn can­’t really be ori­gin­al in the same way as the con­tent in an XML doc­u­ment can be. Some people may dis­agree when it comes to hand-painted yarns, of course.

Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

The book­club dis­cussed Oscar Wilde’s The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray. Read­ing this was a remind­er that one reas­on I go to book­club is to be encour­aged to read books I oth­er­wise would­n’t, and to get more out of them than I can on my own.

The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray (Wiki­pe­dia review) is the story of a beau­ti­ful young man who becomes evil and debauched after he views his por­trait and real­izes how much he wishes to stay look­ing young and beau­ti­ful. His wish is gran­ted; his out­er form stays young and vig­or­ous while the paint­ing shows the effects of his life­style; he keeps the paint­ing hid­den from the world as long as pos­sible. The book played a role in Oscar Wilde’s tri­al and prob­ably influ­enced his being convicted.

I had a hard time get­ting through the book and skimmed many of the more bor­ing pas­sages. While we were dis­cuss­ing the book, it became obvi­ous that part of the reas­on I did­n’t enjoy it as much as the oth­ers did was because I got a ver­sion without foot­notes or an explan­at­ory intro­duc­tion. Know­ing some­thing of the lit­er­ary allu­sions makes a big dif­fer­ence. Those bor­ing pas­sages, for example, were sup­posedly inten­ded to illus­trate the tedi­um of parts of Dori­an Gray’s life. Not that any­one at book­club read them in detail. 

The second edi­tion has a lot of changes from the first edi­tion; new char­ac­ters, pas­sages designed to tone down the homo­eroti­cism, and we had some fun try­ing to fig­ure out how the Vic­tori­an-era audi­ence would have seen the nov­el, com­pared to the way it would be under­stood today. This is where those foot­notes (which the oth­ers in book­club had in their edi­tions) came in handy. 

It’s prob­ably an import­ant book to have read, giv­en its his­tor­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ance; I doubt that I’ll read it again in the near future but if I did, I’d get anoth­er, annot­ated, version.

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.