Copyright Infringement??

Which is tried in civil court, not criminal court. You are not presumed innocent in civil court. ~~ Sooz To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. ~~Joseph Chilton Pearce

Important because not only is it impossible to recover a judgement from someone who lacks the resources, but larger corporations are increasingly finding that they can ignore the judgements... and nothing happens.

-Kalera

Christina Peterson wrote: > It's important to note. You can get a *judgment* that your court and > attorney costs be paid. That is not necessarily the same thing as getting > money. >

Yeah. It's a "normal" practice in big business to keep suing or infringing until the smaller party, often the actual owner of the intellectual property, runs out of money and has to give up.

Kind of like what the insurance companies do to people like Kathy. Frivolous them to death.

Tina

But Christina, we're not talking about big business. We're talking about individuals who many of us know personally.

Mary T. 8-)

Aunt Molly's Bead Street

ebay: seriousbeader

I mentioned big business as an aside... Tina was just responding to that.

-Kalera

Mary Tafoya wrote:

I really do understand what you feel about this. I spent the better part of three years of my life working to shut down a group of women called the 'pattern piggies' who made the national news in the US about their 'sharing' of scanned needlework charts.

It doesn't always take deep pockets, it can also mean having a big support network which some of the needlework artists developed which meant offering a bounty on each design found online. The honest customers were amazing in their support of preventing infringement, you will find that it's the very few that break the law.

And as for other designers who may infringe, they are genuinely in the miniscule minority. Even one is too many but if the designers developed the same sort of support network you'd find that the level of infringement dropped even more. The internet and a chorus of peer disapproval can go a long way.

-Su

vj found this in rec.crafts.beads, from "Su/Cutworks" :

]The internet and a chorus of peer disapproval can go a ]long way.

i'll hope. but right now, i am fighting to stay in business long enough to get everything ready to market.

the ONE thing mine will have will be MY initials and certification numbers. at least that way, people will presumably know they have the real thing.

also, in all honesty, there are only so many ways to do things. other people CAN come up with very similar products on their own. and any patent/copyright i filed here is not going to stop the mass marketers in China, Turkey, or India. look what has happened to 'Bali Silver'. their patterns are reproduced as soon as they hit the market. some of the reproductions aren't even silver!

all i can do is produce the best product i can [and we're working on some new techniques] and hope some people will know the difference, the same way some people know the difference in crystals. they will bear my mark and copyright.

Yep, I think this is by far the best method of showing our support for bead artists who have been ripped off. Exposing ripoffs and refusing to spend our money with thieves can go a looooong way toward righting the wrongs without any need for an attorney. Large corporations have felt the squeeze of grass roots' boycotts - certainly beaders can be every bit as formidable.

Carol in SLC Some of my stuff:

Other spiral roses:

There were lots like these in the 80's - this is where I think they BOTH got the inspiration - spiral roses that were all over the place in the mid to late

80's

Pamy Pamela Welborn Beading Design Creation and Instruction Buy My Kits -

Buy My Patterns -

Well, I don't. Charley's roses bear little resemblance to those, while Dragon's look identical to Charley's.

Carol in SLC Some of my stuff:

Well Pam, you thought wrong. I didn't look at anything when I drew this graph. As a matter of fact I've been drawing roses like this since the 3 grade. That was 1953. Anyone with eyes knows that this is a copy of my design. She didn't even try to change it. Why hasn't she offered to show everyone where she did get her inspiration if not from my book? Cripes, she stood in my LBS and stated that's where her inspiration came from. It's how I found out about this. Charley AKA BeadyBoop

Now that is having a lot of brass balls stating right in front of an LBS where she got her inspiration. How would she think it wouldn't get back to you. Like someone told me not long ago, the beading community is vast and small. Everyone hears everything.

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 13:16:34 -0400, starlia wrote (in message ):

What a polite way of saying we're all up each other's butts. (Rather like my family, or the Cairn Terrier world)

After I looked at the items, I called the family members in for their opinions. Both of them (who have zero interest in beading) felt that one was an exact copy of the other. I pointed out that they are different colors and stitches, and they didn't care. Manda's opinion was that "anyone can pick different colored beads," and neither of them could tell the difference between peyote or square stitch, or Delicas and seed beads.

I found it interesting and enlightening that two disinterested parties would come to the same conclusion as I did. I see the very slight technical differences and the different types of beads, which they didn't, but they still saw the two designs as the same.

Kathy N-V

Welcome, Charley. :)