kak Dinas Ilmi Wirawati, dah jumpa :) Mungkin boleh membantu operasi kita. More at: knitsisters/category/copyright-and-copyleft/ Knitting and copyleft: How would is work? What is to gain? What is to lose? So what does this amount to for knitters? First we have to consider what copyrights mean to knitting usually. For published books of knitting patterns, it often just means “don’t photocopy this except for your own personal use, and don’t use it as a basis for your own work.” For free patterns on the internet, it usually means, “you can make copies of this for others, but you can’t make any money off of it, and you can’t change the contents at all.” For the knitted designs themselves, it is usually (from what I can tell) implicitly understood by knitters to mean “don’t copy someone else’s design directly.” There are often other conditions for the license, ones I admittedly don’t quite understand the purpose of, such as “don’t donate any finished products resulting from this to charity.” I have a feeling this is related to the complicated status of authorship in knitting is a finished pair of socks the product of the designer or the knitter?”rather than a case of people desperately wanting to donate a $70 pair of socks to a shelter or people desperately wanting to stop them from doing so. This question of authorship is, I think, an important one that comes up in every craft, where it is clear that while the designer has a very important role to play, the actual execution of the design (with its color choices, its adaptations, its little fixes and changes, and its own struggle) cannot be said to be without authorship either (it is not “slavish copying,” which is one legal way to discuss a lack of authorship rights). A final knitted garment is the combination of the creativity and skill of the designer with the creativity and skill of the knitter. A final knitted garment is the combination of the creativity and skill of the designer with the creativity and skill of the knitter. The current method of dealing in copyrights in knitting primarily respect only the authorship of the designer, however. So what is to gain by using copyleft licenses rather than traditional copyright warnings? Well, for one thing, it would potentially open up the atmosphere for more collaboration. Want to use someone else’s scarf motif on the sleeves of your sweater design? No (legal) sweat if the scarf design is under a free license. Want to distribute 20 copies of a pattern to your knitting group? Again, not an issue if it is under a free license. If the licenses were sufficiently free (that is, they did not prohibit derivative works and did not prohibit non-commercial use) then you could even imagine taking a handful of copyleft patterns and putting them into a beautiful book and selling them. But notice, you wouldn’t be selling the intellectual property of the book”just the material (paper, ink, binding) and the labor. Since the book itself would have to be licensed under a free license, you wouldn’t be able to make money just by the fact of copyright alone”someone else could easily come along and make their own copies of the same book and sell them for themselves. In economic terms, this would mean that to use this for profit purposes would require extra value other than the intellectual property alone”what would make your book better than someone else’s with similar content might be the good paper you have printed it on, or the sample yarn you attach with it, or simply the fact that it comes from you, in some cases. For big-time design producers, this probably looks like heresy. “Someone could make a book out of my patterns without my permission, much less without paying me? Yarn stores could give away free copies? Ack!” The big fear in most people’s minds when they read things like this is “the Disney fear”: a mega-corporation will come along, take your work, and turn it into a million-dollar blockbuster, and you’ll still be stuck in your shabby house. In practice, this doesn’t happen ” Disney makes their money from their intellectual property rights, and would never consent to releasing their work under a free license, and as such would never use a viral license. Even if they did, though, that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world: they’d still be required to give credit to you, and credit is worth a lot in this world. OK, so Disney doesn’t pay you much for this film, but now that your name is out there it’ll definitely help you find work on your next film. Which is a round-about way of saying that copyleft licenses are probably best for small-time producers, not big-business ones. They allow you to give away a lot, to get your name out there, and allow collaboration, with a few checks in place to avoid getting exploited. The other advantage to the copyleft licenses is that one could also see them as being more respectful of the work that goes into actually creating the finished garment. Rather than being in the role of “the person who does what the designer tells them,” it could help to acknowledge ”in terms of credit and authorship”that the translation from pattern to finished product is itself a creative and collaborative event, and the final product is really the work of at least two people, not just one. Under a truly free license (i.e. one that did not contain “non-commercial” specifications”), a knitter would also be free to sell their finished products, as long as they gave credit where credit was due. I am sure that knitters would have varied opinions on the value of this, but it strikes me as strange that designers have used intellectual property claims as a way of restricting this sort of behavior. No doubt they fear the Disney situation (someone making money off of their hard work), but again, I not only find that unlikely to occur, but I think it fails to recognize that more than one person is doing the hard work in such a situation. Conclusions: little to lose, much to gain? In the knitting world, the small designer has very little to lose by using free licenses on some of their patterns. At the very worst they will get lots of exposure which they can then turn around later for other things. At the very best, it could foster a freer attitude towards knitting and designing, allow for stress-free collaborations and derivative works, and potentially present an alternative model for craft from its guild-like, protective past. Somewhere in between those extremes, the use of standardized licenses could also make copyright issues less ambiguous than they currently are. The goal of copyleft is to try and restore that balance between creativity and restriction, and attempts to do so by encouraging practices which would result in more collaboration and creation of content while preserving important aspects of authorial control used in traditional copyrights. I apologize for being so long-winded about things here (Damn it, Jim, I’m an academic, not a blogger!), and hope that at the very least this might have provoked a greater awareness of copyrights as they apply to knitting, the goals of the copyleft advocates, and perhaps some food-for-thought about the idea of authorship. I’d be very interested in the response of knitters to these ideas (you can e-mail me at: alex [at] atomland-on-mars [dot] com, if you’d like), in part because it is a craft product (and somewhat different in that sense than most of the copyright situations which come up in copyleft discussions), and because I get most of my own understanding of knitting second-hand. I don’t think knitters have much to lose by using copyleft licenses, and could potentially have a lot to gain.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 07:02:04 +0000
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