Chapter 15: Miscellaneous Thievery

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Overview

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?

—Jeremiah 17:9

When kids began swapping music, they certainly weren’t doing anything new. Another generation had already been swapping for years. Many needlework enthusiasts, often older women and grandmothers, had saved money by copying and sharing “counted cross stitch” needlework patterns: grid-filled pieces of paper with instructions for stitching ornate designs on pillows and wall hangings. At first, the women simply made a few copies on the copy machine, passing them along to friends.

When computers and scanners became popular, women could scan the patterns and email them to friends much more easily. For example, Carla Conry, profiled in an August 2000 Los Angeles Times article, created an Internet ring on Yahoo! called “Pattern Piggies Unite” where hundreds of avid traders met to swap scanned patterns. To weed out any industry snoops, the women demanded that new members upload copyrighted patterns before being allowed to join. In several months, members posted more than 10,000 messages, with many bearing attachments of copyrighted patterns.

When pattern-publisher Jim Hedgpeth of Pegasus Originals (http://www.pegasusor.com) saw his revenue stream drop by 40 percent, he gathered others in the industry. Some industry members snuck into the groups, observed the trading, and asked the members to stop infringing on copyrighted material. But when the trading continued, the pattern publishers began suing under the DMCA, effectively shutting down the websites.

Women still trade patterns today, but not as openly as before. Instead, they’ve embraced the same technology used by music traders: file-sharing networks and newsgroups. They still trade needlework patterns, trademarked embroidery patterns (such as Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, and other popular cartoon characters), and patterns for computerized sewing machines. Today, copyrighted and trademarked patterns appear regularly on Usenet’s alt.binaries. crafts.pictures and alt.binaries.patterns.plastic-canvas newsgroups.

Although a few websites allow downloads of cross-stitch patterns, most are based outside the United States, like the Russian site shown in Figure 15-1.

Figure 15-1: This Russian site offers free downloads of copyrighted needlework patterns.

While the media focuses on people stealing music, movies, TV shows, books, programs, and computer games online, few people realize that every type of copyrighted information can be stolen and traded when stored digitally. The threat of stealing copyrighted information goes beyond the entertainment industry and into the world of patient health records and DNA sequences for genetically modified plants. The general rule is that if it can be scanned, copied, or saved as a digital file, it can eventually be stolen and distributed illegally.

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