Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Skinner Sisters Do Copyright

Any serious student of blackwork will have run across The Skinner Sisters' fine website dedicated to this art.  I haven't visited the site in a while so I was surprised to find that Linn Skinner's put her fine mind to work understanding copyright and copyright violations and the impact they are having on charted design authors.
http://www.skinnersisters.com/copyright/

There's a lot of information about copyright law (the U.S. version) and also a list of roughly 49,500 pages of free charts found online.  These come from major publishers and I doubt many of them were put online by their authors.

You can see the impact copyright theft has had on cross stitch designers just by looking at this list.  I think we are very fortunately that painted canvases are harder to steal but I am now worried about my favorite counted canvaswork designers.  Can they survive among the thieves for long?

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com

4 comments:

kraftykat said...

Just read this article . http://judiciary.house.gov/legacy/skinner071703.pdf

Wow! Fast forward 10 years.

Thought you may find this interesting…http://www.addictedtoplasticcanvas.com/ezine/feb2013_issue34.html

The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure said...

Thanks for the update, KraftyKat. Needlepointers are so far pretty free from this mess as the most popular form of our patterns is painted canvases. The use of designs from TV shows, logos of candy bars and high end purses, etc. is a more pressing issue for us. I think we are quite lucky actually. So far my counted thread friends haven't been impacted much as far as I know.

The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure said...

However, I think cross stitch has really been damaged.

Bethieee said...

And the skinner sisters website is down. So your link is sadly broken.