Along the same lines, I have seen a piece of lace submitted to an IOLI
convention competition, which was extremely familiar to me. It did not
take long to find the piece which I remembered. The person had made a
"new" design by transforming an edging with a geometric design... to a
design which had the edge on both sides (no footside). Because this was
a geometric design to begin with, there was not a great deal of change
to be made. She entered this in the "original design" class of the
competition, and it gained an honor. I am being vague for obvious
reasons.
In conversations with others who are far more knowledgeable than I am in
this regard, I was told that the "rule of thumb" is that there must be a
certain percentage of change from the original in order to call it ones
own. (15%, 20%?) But these same experts also said that whenever they
published something that had significant elements of a traditional
piece, they would give credit to the original, as in "...inspired
by...", or "... in the style of..." Now *that* I can live with.
Clay
Clay Blackwell
Lynchburg, VA, USA
Adele Shaak wrote:
Hi:
With some laces, particularly simple designs where you are on a grid
system, it is quite possible for several people to independently
design the same thing. That is nothing more than coincidence and it
is not breaking the law. You don't have to worry about it. You don't
have to know what all the other designs look like and you don't have
to be the judge of whether yours is too similar to another, since your
designed your own.
Let's say someone does sue you over the similarity between your design
and hers. You still don't need to worry. If you have independently
designed it you have your working diagrams and your test pieces and
you've been talking about it with your friends and they'll probably
see or hear about your test pieces and your problems and triumphs -
there is, in other words, a trail of evidence that will protect you.
Some people are deluded by the power of copyright: Many years ago a
lacemaker I knew made a tape lace design in a simple trefoil pattern -
the one that has three loops, one after the other, forming a leaf-like
design. She wrote her name and the copyright symbol on it and proudly
informed everyone that they were no longer permitted to make any lace
using any form of any trefoil pattern, because she had copyrighted it.
She honestly believed she had the power to take over a form of pattern
that has been with us for thousands of years, and because she was a
rather pugnacious woman nobody tried to talk her out of it.
Fortunately she never tried to sue anybody.
Adele
North Vancouver, B.C.
(west coast of Canada)
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