Ups and downs

And sometimes, life's annoyances intrude into your crafty escape.

Downs - I run the Beaded Flowers Database. I had started this because I got sick of flipping through various books, looking at bad pictures or no pictures of flower patterns. Some of the old books don't have pictures for each pattern. Studio Baboo had a listing in document format but that still required hunting and digging through books and you can get a paper cut in the process. Since I'm a software developer and stuff like sql and php and html and javascript don't scare me, this database was the result. This database has been in existence for a few years. I run it and don't ask for donatations because somewhere deepd own inside, I do believe in open source and the sharing of knowledge and information because in the end, that's how we can advance. So it bothers me that there is at least one person out there who has to go and ruin it for the others.

A couple of days ago, there was a post to the beaded flowers yahoo group about an ebay auction with pictures that were taken directly from my site. The person who sent this email is the person who made those flowers and donated them to the website. The ebay seller did not have permission to use those pictures. She has already alerted eBay to unauthorized use of her picture but is still justifiably upset by it. Some other (opinionated) members of the group have spoken up about this issue and basically dragged me into this. As the person who runs the site, yes, I'm hosting them and using the with her permission. I even give her credit for the flowers and the photographs. Beyond contacting eBay and pointing that out, I'm not sure how else I figure into it since I don't hold copyright over those pictures.

As a designer of flower patterns, I know I have to pay attention to others infringing on my copyright. Yeah, I'd be mighty pissed off as well if someone made use of my photographs of something I had done without my permission. But relatively speaking, it's not as mightily pissed off and threatening lawsuit as I would be if someone had taken a pattern of mine and tried to pass it off as their own. I guess this is where this blog comes in handy because you can see things I've done and it's documented for when I did it. So, I kind of have mixed feelings about this. But also, I don't exactly want to be pissing off my target audience for my designs.

I did email ebay tonight to point out where the pictures came from and how they were altered. Because ya, well, if those were my pictures, I'd be mighty pissed off.

Ups - Someone I don't know bought my stitch markers from etsy. And even more exciting, someone I don't know hearts me! That's exciting :)