Conversations such as this hurt business. One person who hears gossip from so and so (in this case, the quilt show director who invented the ridiculous rule that has nothing to do with true copyright law). The rule requires innocent people to perform the equivalent of 'go jump in a lake' in order to submit a beautiful quilt that took hundreds of hours to make. Of course they're going to jump in the lake! And those who find jumping in the lake annoying, simply skip entering a show completely.
So where does this lead us? The owners of the lake get tired of telling people to quit jumping in the lake, so they put up fences (I.e.: ignore emails asking for permission to jump in the lake.) And when the innocent people go public, disheartened because they can't get permission to jump in the lake, it gives the owner a bad reputation, which is completely undeserved. People stop buying quilt patterns, the numbers of quilts entered in shows dwindles down to women who are artistic enough to create their own patterns (I'm not one of them, by the way) and the industry suffers, especially the pattern designers who so graciously share their talent with the rest of us!
Here's another conversation on quilting board, in a thread called "question about copyright"
Originally Posted by
felixxxxxx
.. (name changed to protect the innocent)....There was a big bru-ha-ha about a year ago with McCalls quilt magazine publishing inaccurate info on copyright issues and entering quilt shows. It cause many shows to go into a tailspin demanding quilters who made a quilt from a pattern they did not design themselves get written permission from pattern designers that they could in fact enter the quilt in competition. In fact it caused untold amounts of grief for poor Bonnie Hunter, she was inundated with requests. She finally put something on her website that anyone is free to exhibit a quilt they made using her patterns and to please quit emailing her as it was completely overloading her in box.
It later came out that McCalls was dead wrong in their article but I don't think they ever printed a retraction. If you enter a show there with a pattern you drafted yourself but inspired from a picture on the net I think that is ample information to submit with your entry application and it is doubtful you have infringed on anyones copyright.