Unscrupulous People and Dishonest Sites...

For the last few years I've enjoyed distributing most of my patterns free of charge to my readers. It has brought a lot of joy and satisfaction to my life knowing that there are people who appreciate my hard work in coming up with a fun and unique pattern and a set of instructions that people can understand and follow. There have been some that have taken advantage of my copyright policies in the past -- using items from my patterns and instructions to promote their own businesses, but for the most part I've been grateful that people have been respectful of my wishes to honor my copyrighted materials.

Recently, however, I've come upon some sites that have scraped entire blog posts from my blog and my patterns from Google.docs. These awful sites gather the "best" content from popular blogsites and display it on their website. It's a violation of copyrights, but that doesn't seem to "bother them" until they are caught. The process of having your blog content removed from one of these sites is often laborious. I imagine this violation is sure to continue and get worse with time.

As a result I've taken a couple of my "special" patterns out of Google docs and am selling them in my Etsy store or giving them away free of charge by having you email me for the pattern. In the future I will still create many free patterns that will be available to my readers, but they will only be available by emailing me for the pattern (instead of posting them on the web in Google.docs or directly onto one of my posts). This process of answering emails takes a good deal of my time, but I don't want my patterns stolen and placed on other websites, so it's worth the extra time and effort to me.

I have to admit, I'm frustrated with people who blatantly steal what isn't theirs. 

Update: Thanks to all who commented and sent me emails of encouragement. Go here (to the bottom of the post) for an update.