Careful what you knit!
Saturday, 17. May 2008, 12:57:10
I had to chuckle at this article about the BBC demanding some knitting patterns removed from the web.
Doctor Who knitting patterns removed!
What I find; a: laughable and b: disturbing, is the fact that a knitted likeness of a Dr Who character breaches intellectual property rights. Understandable if it was a stitch by stitch copy of a published pattern but a knitted toy! Please!
I remember making a Tardis from a couple of shoe boxes, a la Blue Peter style, when I was a kid. Various copies of Blake Seven kit were also made from household waste and I was not even aware I was braking the law.
Quaint as it may seem this is the sort of thing which will hamper software development, scientific and engineering research, the arts and possibly commerce in the future.
It was Isaac Newton who famously paid homage to the work previously done by others such as Kepler, Galileo and Descartes and the fact that he used their theories and calculations in his research. On ye shoulders of giants. I´m sure history whould be a lot different if IP Lawyers had been around in the 17th century and I can assure you that no publisher whould have touched Principea. Its a legal mine field.
Doctor Who knitting patterns removed!
What I find; a: laughable and b: disturbing, is the fact that a knitted likeness of a Dr Who character breaches intellectual property rights. Understandable if it was a stitch by stitch copy of a published pattern but a knitted toy! Please!
I remember making a Tardis from a couple of shoe boxes, a la Blue Peter style, when I was a kid. Various copies of Blake Seven kit were also made from household waste and I was not even aware I was braking the law.
Quaint as it may seem this is the sort of thing which will hamper software development, scientific and engineering research, the arts and possibly commerce in the future.
It was Isaac Newton who famously paid homage to the work previously done by others such as Kepler, Galileo and Descartes and the fact that he used their theories and calculations in his research. On ye shoulders of giants. I´m sure history whould be a lot different if IP Lawyers had been around in the 17th century and I can assure you that no publisher whould have touched Principea. Its a legal mine field.
