Sue Fast Sue Easy: Copyrights in an Open Source Community

Sew Fast Sew Easy (SFSE) has annoyed crafters around the world by claiming a copyright for the use of a common term "stitch'n bitch" (tredemarked by SFSE) in CafePress or Yahoo Groups. Leah Kramer from crafters.org writes:

SFSE sent letters to CafePress who in turn asked these knitters to take down any merch with the term “stitch and bitch” (and/or some variation). Also, some stitch and bitch groups were using Yahoo Groups to communicate and for any Yahoo Group that had “stitch and bitch” (and/or some variation) SFSE sent a letter to Yahoo who in turn asked these groups to change their names.

To make their case perfectly clear, SFSE posted the following note to their online forum, “Stitch and Bitch Cafe”:

“No deliberate direction to advertising of any Stitch and Bitch books will be allowed. There is much to be found on knitting in many other books published.”

This means that a customer and a fan of SFSE's stitch'n bitch courses cannot establish a Flickr group called Stitch'n Bitch Fans Helsinki.

Reading the whole story from freetostitchfreetobitch demonstrates at least three things. Firstly, all-rights-reserved copyrights and open source development do not go well together. (Yes, I do think crafters are open source developers, who want to a) work in/through communities and b) share their creations and how-to-instructions with others.) Secondly, despite the fact that crafters are distributed, they are organized. This means that attacking an individual in a worldwide developer network means attacing the network. Thirdly, there are people who actually believe sueing their customers for marketing their service is good for business.

Comments

[juuli]

tukevaa tekstiä! Tekijänoikeusasiat on pitkään kiinnostaneet, ja käsittelin niitä tänään blogissani postaukseesi nojautuen.

[Ulla-Maaria]

Kiitos viestistä! Laitoinkin jo kommentin blogillesi. Tarkoitus ei siis ollut sanoa, että jakamiseen perustuvissa yhteisöissä ei pitäisi olla mitään tekijänoikeuksia.

[juuli]

ymmärsin sen kyllä - halusinpahan hieman kärjistää asioita! Valitettvasti tekijänoikeuksia on käytännössä vaikea mennä peräämään, jos käyttöä tapahtuu muissa maissa. Yksityisillä bloggaajilla ja content providerilla ei ole isoa organisaatiota turvanaan. Ja vaikka jakamaan on tultukin, ei niistä saisi kolmansien osapuolien saavan kaupallista hyötyä. Toisille bloggaajillehan me kirjoitetaan.

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[Jeremy B]

This is one of those things that I'd like to see collapse in the face of widespread non-compliance. Does SFSE really have the resources to take a far-flung, well-distributed army of knitters to court? Probably not (although talking to the "people at the top," i.e. Yahoo! or CafePress, and relying on them to enforce compliance, is fairly savvy, although one wonders if even those organizations have the ability to police everyone or enforce compliance)