I feel like I need to have a little rant into the void
There’s some crafty discourse going on right about sharing patterns with friends and the legality/morality of it and I just have some thoughts
I think in this online age, the parameters of what a ‘friend’ is has expended and in some ways it’s good and in others it’s not. I feel like we have forgotten the important distinction of an acquaintance. I’d like to preface this by saying yes you can make real friends online, I have real friends I’ve made online. But random people you’ve spoken to in online communities are not necessarily your friends, and I think this is where the discourse is coming from.
Should you share patterns with any random acquaintance on the internet? Probably not. That’s where the sort of morality of wanting to support designers comes in. As well as the legality of distributing copyright material. But sharing with an actual friend? That is a non issue. That has been going on since forever. I can guarantee that your grandparents knitting group is swapping patterns amongst themselves and the thought that that would be wrong does not pass their mind.
And it’s this weird issue that only attaches itself to digital content. Like we don’t actually own anything we’ve purchased digitally. No one bats an eye about sharing physical media with a friend, why are we so up in arms about sharing digital media with a friend?
And whilst we’re at it, is this even a problem that is occurring? Knitting patterns do not cost that much money in the grand scheme of things? The only time I have ever shared a pattern was one that was free and no longer available anywhere. After spending whatever amount on yarn, the £5-10 on a pattern is not much of an issue, and if it was, there are so many free patterns.
I just feel like sharing patterns with friends is not as big an issue as it’s being made out to be, and it kinda just discourages community. Should you be mass distributing other people’s patterns? No. Is it important to support designers? Yes, of course, they deserve to be compensated for their work. I do not feel like sharing a pattern with a friend contradicts either of those statements.
