Originally Posted by
mme3924
What about this: A woman buys a pattern for a dress, takes that pattern and fabric which she has purchased, to a dressmaker, who makes the dress, using the purchased pattern. The dressmaker then charges the woman $$ to make the dress from the pattern the woman bought. Do you consider that stealing from whoever designed the pattern? Because money was made, using the pattern....money that was not paid to the designer of the pattern.
Actually, US law says that designs for articles of clothing do not get to be copyrighted. Quilt designs, under US law, have been shown -- at least in most cases -- to be separate from the utilitarian function of 3 layers held together by thread.
We're really dealing with 3 different issues, here, though.
1) The written pattern/instructions: Those cannot be copied except for Personal Use. Plain & Simple. There is plenty of legal precedent on that issue. Don't make copies & distribute to other people, regardless of whether you charge any money, unless you have the permission of the copyright holder.
2) What can be copyrighted: in quilts there are certain things that can be copyrighted & others that cannot. 3 layers held together by stitching cannot be copyrighted. Neither can a quilt based primarily on traditional blocks since they are held in Public Domain. In addition, now certain designs based on copyleft materials also cannot be copyrighted. Any other design can usually be copyrighted as long as it isn't substantially similar to another copyrighted work. The designer has the right to reproduce the quilt, produce other commercial items based on the quilt (similar quilts, workshops, patterns, photos), sell/lease/lend out the quilt & publicly display the quilt.
3) Untested legal opinions: Most of the time if a copyright holder (the original designer or whoever she sold her copyright/patent to: usually a pattern maker or quilting magazine) will send a notice of copyright infringement & possibly a Cease and Desist order to the offending party. The quilter receives the letter, stops making the quilts & that's the end of it. There have literally been maybe a handful or so cases related to quilting IP that reached a judgement. Lawyers are therefore left to look to other cases they think might be similar when forming their legal opinions about hypothetical trials.
There are 2 camps: the first believes that selling quilts based on someone else's copyrighted design is like the Napster music sharing cases back in the late 90's. Hundreds of college kids were heavily fined. They had spent lots of money buying CD's, buying a CD burner, buying writable CD-ROM's & paying the monthly membership fee to Napster to download strangers' music, but the court still found them guilty of copyright infringement. Napster faced even heavier fines & filed for bankruptcy. This camp believes that quilters technically only buy the right to the pattern itself & that any additional rights must be directly granted (either by notice on the package or in writing) whenever such activities impact the potential market or value of the quilt design and/or pattern.
The other camp doesn't stand on as much legal precedent, but believes they have a very clear, simple argument. They believe that the clear purpose of a pattern is to make something substantially similar to the item depicted. They feel that by translating a design into a pattern, the designer is
implicitly giving up most, if not all, of the rights to her copyrighted/patented design. Such lawyers argue that so long as a person legally purchases one copy of instructions/pattern, that person has the right to make &/or sell unlimited quilts based on the pattern as long as they don't sell copies of the written pattern/instructions It's a tougher argument to make, but stranger cases have been won.
Personally, I think it would be a great loss for the arts & quilting communities if designs cannot be protected. Who would bother to spend 3 months of their life coming up with a beautiful new quilt design for $2,000 if they could use that same amount of time to replicate others' work and make $12,000?