Do They Understand It Is Stealing?

There is a brief moment of silence in my cave this morning, which is gloomier than usual due to the lingering rain clouds from yesterday's sogginess, so I thought I would "blog" before heading out. Nick and I were up at Staples recently to pick up yet another batch of charts to make up into chartpacks. As I stood in line to pay for them, I noticed two women at the self serve photocopy machine making copies of some cross stitch charts. I could just catch snipets of their conversation over the din of the back to school shoppers, but they seemed to be discussing the clarity of the copies and complaining about the cost. Now at 6'5" in my bare feet, I have never been very good at being "demure"... so I just said to N ick in a slightly raised voice "Well, I just have to hope that they are making working copies of stuff that they own instead of to share!"

Once of the women glanced up and I got ready to say something polite. "You see, I am a cross stitch designer and though I didn't design the charts you are copying to avoid buying an original, I probably know the designer who created that beautiful pattern you are longing to stitch... If that isn't a copy for you to mark up as you stitch it, then you are cheating someone out of payment for something they created."
I am sure I would have been eloquent... I know that I would have been nice, just like the speaches I was rehearsing in my head...but that is when the nice person at the copy centre finished totalling my copy job and ink cartridges, announcing the total again so that I would finish writing my cheque.

When I looked up, the two ladies were gone. Nick spotted them in the first general line-up, but they scurried to a lane farther away as we hefted our boxes of copies to take home to bag up that evening (I justified alot of the shows I watched this summer like Amazing Race or American Juniors because Nick and I were bagging up patterns night after night as soon as the girls went to bed!). I had been h oping that they were just making copies because they didn't know any better...

I understand the frustration from a stitcher's point of view... but if her friend had a pattern she wanted to stitch, why not wait until one was finished and then use the original and make your own working copy? That each of these ladies made their own copies leads me to assume they borrowed the pattern from a third person. So maybe now some designer I know lost 2 sales of that pattern.

I looked down at the box hol ding several hundred dollars worth of photo copies onto the highest quality paper they had, the ink cartridges that I needed to print more chartpack covers and the hours of bagging we were going to spend that night. Was someone in a city far away going t o slap these on a self-serve copier for her friends? Would one of them be scanned in and shared electronically?

Perhaps those women will think twice next time... and perhaps not. It seems like such a small thing... It doesn't really hurt the desi gner to lose a sale or two... I'm just sharing with a friend....

I sure hope someone, somewhere isn't thinking that as they copy one of my patterns!!

Jennifer at Dragon Dreamse