Thank you Michelle for gifting me with Family Tree by Barbara Delinskky and A deadly yarn by Maggie Sefton. You gifted me as a thank you for podcasting, and opened my eyesto trust a beautiful random act of kindness.I definitely will pass them along to someone else in the same spirit!
Thank you Leslie from Femknitzi.blogspot.com. for a beautiful skein of yarn and and IK mag! Wheee that was the first contest I have ever won.
CONTESTS
For She-Knits contest please check here
Molecular Knittings contest will be posted August @7th
U-hanbags contest is for your choice of one otwo UK mags.
Archivist on the edge's contest may win you some Wollmeise yarn
Knitting haweye's contest asks you to troll for attractive hawkeye Football Players to win some yarn
6 comments:
I love hearing you talk about your kids. Even though I know it must be hard it gives me an insight to how it's going to be when I have some of my own and what my mom must have gone through with me.
Hi Sharon--just catching up on your podcasts, and I just have to say Bravo! for getting through so many heart-tugging things with your kids in such a short time. When I think back to bringing up my kids--who were close in age to each other--I had rests between the milestones. With the range in age of your kids, you seem to be going through the whole gamut all at once. Amazing! But you do need to believe in your work. Your bags are beautiful and I'm certain you'll be successful with them. One other thing--do you listen to the WEBS podcast? They're going to do a knitalong on that Nora Gaughan duster pattern you like.
I do not have children and I am already in my fifties so I will never have children, but I do love to listen to your podcasts.
Sharon - congrats on the L&V ESOTD mention!! I hope it brings your shop plenty of new traffic and customers!!
-JavaNut
Hey Sharon-
I had to write to tell you that I feel very sad for you -- I hear you talk time and time again about how you are feeling some empty spots now that your kids are growing up and away, but at the same time I don't think you really give people a chance to BECOME close friends.
Sure, we all want those bosom-buddies-types whom we can tell anything and really be close to, but those kinds of friendships grow over time, and I believe they are more difficult to make in "the real world" than online. Online we can hide the more jagged parts of ourselves and present only our best sides to others through e-mail and blog posts... it's sort of a false sense of intimacy, in a way... But in-person friends are worth the effort.
You might not click immediately with the other moms in the kindergarten class, but it sounds like you don't give them much of a chance... same with the knitting group. You are quick to dismiss them without putting at least a little bit of time and effort into getting to know them.
Regarding the knitting group... it would be a bit strange to visit with people you don't know at all and whom you probably won't see again... but you never know! Wouldn't it be fun to have a group to drop in on every time you came to Colorado to visit your daughter? And with the Internet, you could have met someone in person and THEN followed up with an e-mail correspondence. You seemed disappointed that there wasn't an immediate "bonding" but it didn't really seem like you put yourself in a position for connections to happen.
I don't mean to be harsh, and I don't mean to be critical, but it's something that has occurred to me as I've listened to you over the past months. When I listened to your podcasts, I thought, "I am probably one of those moms who'd be chatting with other moms who Sharon would immediately dismiss because she'd think we don't have anything in common." Yet I consider myself a thoughtful, happy, kind person (and a knitter) -- who makes a good friend!
I'd just hate to see you miss some great friendship opportunities because you were too quick to judge others.
Just my $.02...
Here are hugs for you as your babies leave the nest!
xoxox
Lain
I think this is the episode that you talked about copyright and problems that you've encountered in the past. I'd like to add my $0.02 about this as it's something that really matters to me. It might help to know that I'm a college English professor among whose greatest challenges include convincing freshman that it's not okay to copy content from the internet into their papers and pass it off as their own. Although they're not the exact same things, copyright and plagiarism issues follow the same logic.
I'm going to explain this as I do for my freshman comp students, so please excuse the very simple examples. This is pretty much the same spiel I give my students, so sorry if it sounds preachy.
Ideas, whether they are written, sung, or drawn, are "property" that the person who thought that idea up can "profit" from, whether that be monetarily or otherwise. Copyright protects that idea so that anyone else who wants to make that product has to do so in such a way to be distinctive from the other products that are similar to it . Example: generic barbie dolls look and feel like Mattel Barbie, but are just different enough to remain distinctly separate. Ask any 5 year old girl, and she'll pick the Mattel Barbie as the "real" one every time.
In other cases, the person has been granted permission to use the idea in a particular capacity. In these cases, very specific stipulations are placed on the use of the product. A good example of this is how music is used in TV shows, movies, etc. The movie producer must 1) ask for the artist's permission to use the song and be granted permission and 2) in some cases the movie producer must pay for the right to use the song. This fee might change based upon how it is used: if it's the movie's theme, the cost might be greater than if it's just "mood music."
When one uses/takes that idea without the creator's permission, that person has "stolen" the idea. Now I'm not saying that you purposefully stole the idea of the shrug that you knit and were selling. You didn't know that this was a problem.
But what did happen was you used the pattern outside of the agreement about use when you purchased the pattern. In other words, you created competition that was "unfair" and were profiting from that person's work without permission. Now if you had approached the pattern maker and she had agreed that you could sell the garment (for a fee?, for attribution?, depends on what she wanted), you would have been in the clear.
And your hesitance about allowing others to make your bag for profit shows this use of copyright. The issue here isn't that you don't want others making bags without attribution: you want to protect the market for your product. Can you stop others from making other felted bags that would compete with yours? Of course not, but you can stop direct competition from others making your bags. That is your right under copyright. If you want to grant permission or sell that right, that's your perogative, but it's your perogative, not the buyer's.
Can the pattern maker ask you to cease and desist if you were to make your own shrug pattern that you made for sale (as a garment, pattern, etc.)? No, because you created the pattern and have the right to determine how that patterns can be used. The same goes for the bags you make. A free pattern on the internet carries the same rights: if I put my pattern on my blog and stipulate that my copyright reserves my right to sell product but you can use it for "personal use," it means that even though it's free, you can't make the product for profit. I have seen many such patterns on the internet with this stipulation at the bottom because these pattern makers intend them to be used for charity knitting.
When you acquire a pattern that someone else created (that you purchased, downloaded for free from the web, etc.), you are agreeing to use that pattern according to the terms that the pattern maker stipulates. Usually, that means that you have "personal use" so that you can make multiple garments, but you can't sell them.
Where things get murky, and I don't have an answer for this part and I haven't explored it enough to be able to begin an answer, is what is the difference between what you're talking about (using a pattern and making the product for sale) and being commissioned to make a piece from a pattern that can be purchased.
For example, someone wants to hire me to make an EZ baby surprise jacket. Would the person have to buy a copy of Knitting Without Tears in order to be in keeping with copyright rules? Would the sale price be for the product or for the labor or both? Or does it even matter? Am I in violation of copyright because I sold the garment, regardless of intention?
I hope this helps you with the beginning of copyright issues. This issue goes well beyond what you've encountered and you should look into your rights as a pattern maker will is selling patterns to publishers. You want to be able to maintain your rights (and in some cases control) over the patterns that you've created. In some cases, selling your pattern also includes selling the copyright so that you wouldn't be able to sell that product for the pattern you made. Who holds the copyright matters a great deal. And I hope that I haven't offended you. If anything, I'm genuinely interested in thinking through this problem.
I've recently started listening to your blog (like last week) and have greatly enjoyed hearing about your "adventures" as a mom of 7. I don't have kids and grew up in a small family (2 kids) and have always wondered how larger families are different. Now I have a better idea from the mom's perspective.
I hope your school year is going well and you're settling into your routine as a mom who's at home by herself. Good luck and enjoy the "down time" (is there such a thing?). You've earned it.
Nancy C.
PS. I attended a library conference this past summer that partially covered copyright issues (specifically for scholarly publishing) and the organizing committee encouraged us to use the SPARC website. There's a page with author's rights and several html documents that outline the major issues. Although they aren't the same, this might be a good place to begin thinking through some of the broader issues.
The other thing you might be interested in is the "new" license agreement that protects your rights as creator, but is much more fluid than traditional copyright. Check out Creative Commons. There are several different ways to do this, including just attribution, attribution without commercial rights, attribution with commercial right, share and share alike, etc. It's interesting and something that's in the spirit of freedom of information, creativity.
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