Some years ago at a lace convention a lawyer addressed us on the subject of copyright. It was an amusing presentation because the orientation of the talk was the supposition that members of the audience may have designed something that they would like to protect and how to do that. However, all the questions were about how far you could go in publishing other people's work before you had gone too far. One questioner was absolutely certain that you could publish another person's pattern, without payment, a long as you mentioned the other person's name as the originator of the pattern. Although the answer was, "only if that person has agreed to it", the questioner would not accept this answer. Another question was, "If I buy the pattern, can I make a copy for a friend?" The answer was, if I recall correctly, "only if it does not damage the person who owns the copyright. The lawyer said, "You might consider everyone in this room to be your friend, but if you gave a copy of a pattern from a book to everyone in this room, it would materially damage the sale of the book it came from, because the market is so small." I had the interesting experience of writing an article for the IOL Bulletin and later receiving a request to translate it into German for publication in a German Lace Mag. I had no idea what the legal status of this request was. I had no objection to it being republished. In fact, I was flattered. I asked the IOL and they had no idea whether their permission was required, but said they had no objection. My personal take on this is that I own the copyright, because I wrote it, and the IOL printed it with my permission. Now the German magazine is printing the translation with my permission. I may have gotten an extra copy of the issue, but the IOL certainly didn't buy it from me. Perhaps the IOL is missing a bet. It should have Tom write a regular feature called "Copyright Corner" where he deals with hypotheticals such as the Channer Mat Paradox. Devon
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