I almost posted this as a comment over on Doe-C-Doe's (based on her comment about how copyright had helped her but she was still concerned about the Vogart issue) but I decided that perhaps she had moved past this, and it might be seen as churlish to post it there, in her comments, but:

I wonder what the original designers for Vogart got paid? I'd bet it wasn't much. I bet it was a lot less than some of the "small businesswomen" selling their own designs on Etsy make - because those folks make money off of every pattern they sell. I bet Vogart didn't do royalties.

And Vogart enforcing copyright on OOP patterns most likely won't get the original designers (or more likely, their heirs) any more money now.

Perhaps I take a jaundiced view of this because of My Experience In Writing Journal Articles. I know I've harped on this before but it is a sore point: you spend maybe six months to a year writing a research article (sometimes more). You send it off to a journal. IF it is accepted (usually requiring revisions, maybe a few more weeks' worth of time), there's a little form you sign.

Which assigns your copyright to the journal. You give up any ownership of the paper.

To the point of which, if you want to make a coursepack with a paper YOU wrote in it, you have to pay copyright fees to the journal.

And if you wish to subscribe to the journal? $100+ dollars a year (and it can be three times that for an academic library to subscribe). (And in some cases in order to publish you have to BELONG to the society publishing the journal, perhaps another $50 annually.)

And some journals have page charges where you (or, more likely, your institution) pays $50 (that's what it was last time I had something in a journal with page charges) a page for the privilege of you assigning your copyright to them.

Oh - and also, if you want to read an article in a journal your library does not get, or does not have an electronic subscription to? In some cases, you need to be prepared to shell out $30 or so.

So the advantage is very much with the journals. I know it's expensive to do those small print runs of things, but it irks me because production of journal articles is something you MUST do (at least in the sciences) if you want tenure and promotion. And it feels to me kind of like a big racket where the people actually generating the knowledge - the researchers - are treated like the servants of the journal.

I think in some branches of the "craft" industry it's kind of similar - you get paid a flat fee (often not much) and then the magazine or publisher or whomever owns your design forever and can reprint it at will. And you can't even teach a class using your own previously-published design unless you pay a fee to the company.

True, "big name" designers like Mary Engelbreit probably can negotiate better packages, but I suspect the majority of people writing greeting cards or doing the drawings that go on stickers or writing patterns for those little Coats and Clark's booklets get a small check and a letter of thanks and that's it.

I think I would be more vigorous in my defense of the company-that-owns-Vogart's copyright enforcement if I felt that it was truly a move to help designers - either those who originally designed the patterns (or, as I said, their heirs...some of these patterns were first published in the 40s) or the ones designing now. But I kind of think that's not it.

And if the ladies who posted patterns online were SELLING them, that would be a very different matter. But no one was actually making money off of the exchange of designs. In a way, I suppose, it could be viewed as a situation similar to that of a neighbor loaning you a book she had finished reading so you could read it...

If money had actually been changing hands that would have been different.

I mean - there are lots of folks on Etsy who design, who sell their designs in a small way through that website. They deserve protection from people who take their designs and sell pirated copies. But there's a difference between a pattern currently in print and available, and one that was last widely available 60 years ago.

If the company that owns Vogart wanted to do the right thing? They could make their catalog of patterns for sale as a print-on-demand sort of thing, like .pdf files. You pay your $3 or whatever through PayPal, and they send you a .pdf copy of the design you want. (Or maybe make a "subscription" to the whole catalog available, which would be fantastic - you could pay an annual fee and then be allowed to print whichever designs you want). And use the proceeds to either help the families of the original designers, or to help sponsor new designers.

I don't know. I'm really NOT one of those "information wants to be free" types. But I also feel sometimes that the way some of the big publishers handle information is a bit greedy.