For as long as I have been online sharing my crochet and knitting – a very long time now – people have argued and bickered over who can do what with their finished items.
Here is my policy, based on what I have heard back from various lawyers over the years:
You can sell whatever you make. Those are YOUR finished items. You can make as many as you want, sell as many as you want. I can’t dictate how many pairs of socks you make from my patterns. Make as many as you want. Give them away, sell them, they’re not mine to control. It does not matter if the pattern was free or paid – what you make is yours. What you’re getting from me is instruction.
Please credit me and link back to this site. That is the polite thing to do and it has become accepted etiquette in the crafting and arts communities. Site traffic and money earned from AdSense clicks is what keeps this site going. The more money I earn from this site because of increased traffic, the more I can buy yarn and keep the patterns flowing.
What you can’t do is take my patterns and pass them off as yours. There is no such thing as the “10% rule”. I don’t know who made that up but it is not a thing. If you’re wondering what that means, it is a bit of lore that gets repeated in crafting circles: If you take a pattern and change 10% of it, it is now your pattern.
Let’s reframe that: if you stand on my shoulders and change my work by this little teensy bit, it magically becomes yours.
No, it does not. Don’t do it. It’s no different than plagiarizing a term paper and you make Baby Jesus cry.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!!