Hello friends! I will be posting about the IHSW tomorrow, but today I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to something that happened yesterday.
On Sprite Stitch, one of the members made a post about some of our patterns being sold on a website, “Los Angeles Needlework”. I’m not going to give it the luxury of having a link from me.
So on behalf of affected SS members, I emailed the person politely to inform her of the concerns and ask her to either seek permission for use or remove the patterns. I also made a small post on her Facebook page, which was promptly deleted and I was blocked from posting anymore comments. The same happened to several other people. It then turned out that every pattern she is selling has been taken from someone else. They have all been informed and everyone is doing their best to take legitimate courses of action. The Facebook page, Pinterest and Etsy shop have been closed, but as of the time of writing the main shop site is still up and running.
I cannot tell you how despicable I think this person is. To take other people’s work and pass them off as her own and take money from people who do not need to spend it on these patterns is low. But what really annoys me is the behavior – the deleting and blocking. It says to me that she knows what she’s doing is wrong. That is the worst part of all of this.
This is not the first incident of free patterns being sold by people who should not be selling them, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But I wanted to share this information with my friends and readers in the hopes that we can totally discredit this individual and stop her from taking any more money from people.
Here’s some links to other posts about this:
http://jemimabean.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/counterfeit-dresden-petal-handbag.html
http://sewhooked.com/2013/02/17/pattern-theft-alert
http://artisania.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/pattern-theft
http://www.dorkstitch.com/stolen-content
Sorry for the nature of this post, but I felt it was important to make it. Normal service will be resumed shortly, so look out for my next post!