Another Copyright Question
 

Can you stand another query about copyrights? Please bear with me. Our small quilt guild is wanting to make a quilt from a magazine as a project. The pattern was offered free online last year and several have it printed out and ready to go. Do we have to contact the magazine company that offered it to seek permission to use it as a project for personal use? I did ask in an email and have not had any response from them. Should I try to call them? This was offered free online to print out and also in their magazine. It is the First Snow pattern. Any help with trying to figure this out would be appreciated. I don't want to do something wrong in making it a project, but on the other hand I would think that if it was free online it should be ok.

I would think that any pattern offer for free on the internet can be used freely. I would make one last try at calling them directly. Is this the pattern?? Good Luck.
http://www.quiltersnewsletter.com/ar...September_2014

If you aren't selling the pattern instructions or the quilts you make from the pattern, you are good to go. And some would say you could even sell the quilts you make, but it doesn't sound like that's the issue for you.

It is still a violation of copyright to copy and distribute the pattern without permission. The magazine offers the free pattern in order to get people to come to their web site. So you can't legally copy the pattern and distribute it to everyone in the group without permission. However everyone in the group could go to the web site and download the pattern if it is still online.

In this case, it doesn't sound so much like you want to copy the pattern as that you want multiple people to be working on the quilt that uses the pattern. If you don't hear back from the magazine, I would suggest that someone who legitimately has the pattern should divvy up the work and write your own instructions for each part to be done by others. We ran into this situation with an opportunity quilt one of my guilds was making. We assigned several members to make a certain number of one type of block, and others made a different type of block. It turned out that the instructions in the magazine were fine if one person was making the whole quilt, but were confusing if that person only needed to make a subset of it, so we wrote our own instructions for making each block. The blocks themselves weren't original to the copyright holder, so this was not a violation of copyright.

What this may not get around is another little known copyright protection. If the quilt in the pattern is copyrighted (and not just the pattern itself), then the copyright holder's permission is required if copy of that quilt is displayed in public. Most quilts are not themselves original enough for copyright protection, and pattern authors almost always give their permission. But it's something to think about.

If the pattern Maniac linked to is correct, they list the pattern designer as Tina Curran. She now offers this pattern for sale on her website
https://www.quiltandsewshop.com/prod...ate&cid=138859

So the members who do not have the pattern will probably need to purchase it. I suspect it is Tina who owns the copyright to the pattern, not the magazine.

Well I called customer service at Creative Crafts Group at the Quilt and Sew Shop website and I spoke with Shelly. She said that as long as we are not selling the patterns we have the go ahead. It was pointed out that those who did not print them out already could go to their library and get the back issues of the magazine and print them out from them. She said that if they were intending to sell the quilts, ( which we are not) we would have to give Tina Curan the credit for her pattern. They were very nice and helpful.

Am I understanding correctly there is no longer a site for the pattern free?

Since it was offered free online, I don't think you should have a problem, but you should probably note on the label the magazine/quilter just because it's nice to give them credit.

I agree with MargeD. Definitely should give credit to the pattern designer (especially one that is so generous!).