Ethics vs Law

Just because you can, does that mean you should?

“What’s legal and what’s ethical are two different set points. “Can I get away with it?” is not the metric I want to use to run my business.”

— a quilt industry colleague.

I had a situation happen recently. Essentially, someone took my intellectual property (a popular bag pattern) and made their own on-demand, lifetime-access class for it. A side note here… I have my own class for this pattern; it’s been out for three years.

Consider this tale a case study. No, I’m not naming names because the trolling that happens in these situations is foul. People dog-pile on with opinions founded on boredom-fomented nastiness - not on reasoned thoughts based in actually reading about the situation - and it gets ugly fast from the anonymous safety of the their keyboards. Heaven forbid you question the darling objects of their rabid fandoms (looking at you, Swifties) lest you get death threats. Over what… a quilt pattern???

So no. No names.

When I found out this was afoot, I was gobsmacked. I’ve learned how to fight copyright violation in the retail sector, and fended off every well-meaning store that pinkie-promised me that if I just give them a PDF, they’ll pay me for any copies they make, honest. I’ve written my fair share of C&Ds and DMCA takedowns. I wasn’t expecting such a thing to come at me sideways from an industry colleague.

I have no playbook for that. Yet.

During the process of making her class, no contact with me was made, which is the the thing that confounds me most. I would have been open to collaboration. Had we talked, I could have stopped her from creating a competing product, and offered to collaborate on something else. I could have contributed my designer-level know-how to the idea for a stronger product offering for the customers. I can’t see a single downside to being contacted at the beginning of the concept, other than financial: if you collaborate, you might have to share the profits.

Yes, she was selling my pattern legally; she bought them from a distributor for resale, so I get the minimum profit possible from that. If you don’t know the breakdown here, distributors in the craft industry pay 35% of the retail price, and the creator’s production costs come out of that. I would make significantly more if she bought it directly from me at wholesale, to the tune of three bucks per pattern (and her costs remain the same).

The thing is, I (and several smart and trusted colleagues) cannot see a legal line that has been crossed. She is essentially an influencer. She didn’t use my images for the class, and she states clearly that the class requires my pattern, so she rightly didn’t give that info away. She has strategically stayed on the good side of known lines of legal copyright engagement.

So I reached out to her for a private conversation.*

She felt that, in her role as an influencer who serves the demands of her community (they want her style of teaching only) she is elevating people by teaching their products to her people.

And I’ll agree with that - my pattern and name got in front of new people.

But none of the other stuff that counts more flowed my way:

• Active links to me (not just the mentions) because, let’s be real, people are too lazy to type it into the googles

• The chance to get these people on my mailing list so I, too, can market to them

• Keeping my top spot in SEO (her reach is larger, so she’ll likely take it over at some point)

• A decent share of the profits considering my pattern, the core intellectual property, is the foundation of the entire affair.

For reference… I’m making $3.50, she’s making $37 for the class plus $6.50 pattern markup - twelve times more than me.

She said she rarely asks creators if she can feature their products - she just does her class, and they’re happy for the exposure.

And some people have told me to be grateful for the exposure (really?) but I can’t pay bills with that. I can pay them with money, the cold, hard, cash-or-Venmo kind. The better-than-10%-of-the-spoils kind. The sell-to-a-repeat-customer kind.

And to be as honest as I can possibly be without resorting to Roy Kent-level profanity, I’m REALLY sick of people telling me to be grateful for the crumbs of exposure. We can absolutely do better and smarter than that. Uncompensated exposure is an age-old and perpetual abuse of power. And as a mock currency, it dooms creators. You can die of exposure.

On-demand eduction in the craft world used to belong to Craftsy, and a couple other distant competitors. Today, online education is the Wild West, mimicking the explosion of streaming channels available to us; innumerable solo, embedded platforms and communities, platforms run by publishing companies and corporations (I use this version), and paywalled YouTube and Patreon content, etc.

What hasn’t kept up is an appropriate amount of copyright law to govern it. Just look at the fights we’re having over AI.

So in absence of law, we’re left trying to rely on the slipperiest of slopes, ethical behavior.

I say let's take some of the slip out of that slope, and define a Code of Conduct.

I'll take a stab. How about this, for a Code of Conduct for making from another creator's intellectual property, especially if profit is involved:

• Start with the ASK. Respect the creator, because you wouldn’t be interested if it wasn’t a good product

• Assume they’re open to a collaboration (we can all rise together); accept the NO and move on if they’re not

• Design a product/thing/outcome that shares the profit

• Don’t design one that’s made to screw over the creator

• NEVER offer exposure as adequate compensation

• Use a contract (contracts protect EVERYONE)

• Lay out the money terms so it’s clear to all

• Take care of each other

• Take care of the customers

*We started on the common ground that neither of us was interested in an internet pissing match, and that taking care of the already enrolled customers was a priority (EVERYONE loses when we chase a customer out of the industry).

We hammered out some going-forward solutions, things I felt were good enough for an after-the-fact arrangement, taking into account that burning even more time arguing would be even more costly.

However, none of this came to fruition; she ghosted.