Thinking about Creative Commons licensing.

I've been thinking about copyright and Creative Commons licensing for a little while, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.

What I want to do is this:

1) Write a simple knitting pattern.
2) Sell it to people.
3) Allow people to sell items that they've made by following my pattern.

Normally, the default position is that I retain the copyright to that knitting pattern, and that whilst people are free to knit the item for their own personal use, they're not allowed to sell anything that they make from my instructions.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people knitting an item that they've made from my pattern, and popping it into their Etsy store, as long as it's apparent that the original pattern is mine, and that I can be credited for it in some way. I feel as though the pattern and the work produced from it are two separate things, and in that in this specific situation it makes sense to treat them as such.

I've been reading through the Creative Commons website, and although I still have plenty of small print to check, I think there are licenses which would make this possible.

I've also seen it in action on the internet... Amy Karol, also known as Angry Chicken, has written a book of sewing patterns, called Bend-The-Rules Sewing. There's a Flickr group for the book to encourage people to showcase the items that they've made, which I think is a really nice idea. But the really exciting thing is that Amy Karol and her publishers are allowing people to make and sell items from her patterns, as long as a certain disclaimer is in place declaring that the pattern itself still belongs to Amy.

I think this approach is an absolute blessing for crafters everywhere! Lots of people are great at knitting, for example, but wouldn't know where to begin to write their own patterns. But if they want to sell anything they've knitted, they can't. Not if they've used a pattern from a published book, a magazine, or even a free pattern that they found online. Yes, people are doing it, but it's stated very clearly that they shouldn't be.

The reason I don't sell a lot of the dresses that I've been making on my website is that I'm not allowed. I'm a dressmaker, not a pattern drafter - they're two quite different sets of skills. But all of the commercial sewing patterns are copyrighted, so the only way that I can use them is to make one dress, for one person. Selling multiples of Rhona's latest dress on my website for example, even if I clearly state that the pattern itself was produced by McCalls, is strictly in breach of copyright.

So where do knitters and dressmakers and craftspeople go, if they're more interested in doing the practical work than writing the patterns? This is where the concept of separating the pattern itself from the work that's produced from it comes in, and I think that it's an excellent idea.