I started knitting in 2006, and I've been on Ravelry since you needed an invitation to participate in the beta. My mom taught me how to crochet when I was a child, but I've done a lot more knitting since learning because I prefer the look of knit fabric for clothing. However, recently, especially since the pandemic shutdowns, the youths have taken up crochet, and I had FOMO.
(I suspect a large part of why young people crochet rather than knit is due to the prevalence of "video tutorials" on YouTube that these people raised in media saturation prefer, rather than having to decipher a written pattern. And those kids can get off my lawn!!! I love Millennials and Gen Z. Really. They just choose not to read, which breaks my heart, though I digress.)
In any case, the resurgence of crochet had me looking at crochet patterns, and a pattern listed on Ravelry directed me to Etsy, which has a gobsmacking number of crochet patterns.
I was a little annoyed that people have listed patterns for sale that are clearly just scans of old knitting and crochet magazines. The Etsy store owners can have no claim of ownership of the intellectual property of a pattern in a physical copy of Vogue Knitting magazine from the mid-80s that they found in their grandmother's craft room, and here they are charging $2 for it. It didn't bother me too much with REALLY old—excuse me, "vintage"—patterns because there is no other way to acquire the out-of-print pattern legally and to compensate the 1980s designers or publishers, so $2 for the work of scanning and uploading? OK, I guess. Still hinky, but whatever.
However, in flicking through the Etsy patterns, I recognized a crochet top that I had actually made from a pattern I'd found on Ravelry. The top had the same name as the one I'd made, but the store name didn't ring a bell. So I checked Ravelry, and indeed, the pattern is available for free from the actual designer on her website. There is at least one other pattern by that designer in the Etsy shop in question. The Etsy thief even used her pictures for one of the tops! And they are asking for $6.36 for a literally freely-available pattern. I hunted around for a comment section to be able to link to the designer's website and the free pattern, but you need to be a verified buyer in order to comment. I looked for a way to report the listing, but the only option was to report a listing as your own intellectual property, not someone else's. So I went to the designer's Ravelry page and sent her a message letting her know that SHE could report the fraudulent listing. I certainly didn't buy the pattern from Etsy to see how much work the seller might have done to turn the blog post into a downloadable PDF, or if they clicked Print-to-PDF on the blog post and uploaded.
(As of a week later, the designer has not responded to my message, so either she's not checking Ravelry, or she just doesn't think it's worth the trouble to address the fraud.)
So now, in addition to questioning whether I should use Etsy because the corporation has increased its cut of actual creators' pay, if I do choose to buy something from Etsy, I need to investigate the sellers to see whether they seem to be the owners of the intellectual property because Etsy evidently turns a blind eye.
And all of this, along with the many ways to manipulate Kindle self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited to either downright steal other people's writing or game the system to trick it into paying more than you've earned, offends my sense of fair play. That there are so many people looking for a way to cheat rather than create is just so infuriating and disheartening at the same time.
