As, I understand it, the principle behind copyright law is to encourage creativity by ensuring that those who invest effort in a pattern or other intellectual property may profit from it. Publishers who take the risk in publishing the work are also deserving of the right to profit. I believe whole heartedly in this principle. I pay top dollar for lace books with the hope that the publisher will continue to print them and the creator will continue to create them. It breaks my heart when I hear a gifted lace person regret ever having spent the time writing a book, and this happens quite often. I get a little confused though when the fact pattern gets as convoluted and distorted as the Channer Mat problem. Ruth Bean constantly asserts that there is no profit to be made from this pattern. I have no doubt they are correct. It is rare that you hear that anyone has made any money publishing a lace book. The market is extremely small. They already published it once, thus saturating the market. It is entirely doubtful that they would ever publish it again. I am not sure what the minimum print run is that can be profitable. I am sure it is not 100. It is probably not 1000. If Ruth Bean keeps a list of everyone who wants the pattern with the idea of publishing when it gets to 1000, I think that it will take 20 years and the people who put their names on the list first will be dead, so there will still not be a thousand people who want the pattern even then. There are roughly 7,000 lacemakers in the English speaking world. Probably 500 have the pattern. Probably 6,400 don't want it. I don't blame Ruth Bean for not wanting to take a financial bath by republishing Channer's Mat. So, if there is no profit in the pattern, hypothetically, copying it doesn't sound like it is hurting them. If you were, hypothetically, to say the profit on each pattern was $10 and they suffer a $10 loss if you photocopy the pattern, they could sue you for $10 according to Tom. I even asked them if they would allow people to photocopy the pattern and send them the amount that they would consider the profit, ie. $10 and they said no. It is too much trouble for them to accept the individual $10 sums. This is entirely understandable. Maybe someone should offer to handle the paper work of clearing the checks from "honor payments" so they could receive it in a yearly lump sum which would be cheaper for them to process. Meanwhile, of course, the pattern is selling on e-bay and the second hand market. When these sell the dealers profit, extraordinarily. No money is kicked back to Ruth Bean or Channer, or Bury. Theoretically people could sell one copy to each other, copy for their own use, sell to another. Personally, I would rather see the creators or the publishers profit in order to encourage creativity and the publication of more lace patterns. I appreciate the role that used book sellers play and that they work quite hard. However, it would make more sense in terms of accomplishing the goals of the copyright law to photocopy the pattern and use the $70 you would pay on e-bay for the pattern to take the president of Ruth Bean, Bury and the Channer heirs out to dinner as a special thank you for creating and publishing it originally. Morally, I find the whole thing quite confusing. Mind you, I don't even want a copy. My skills aren't up to it and I don't think it is all that pretty. Devon
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