A Sad Commentary

I was very saddened last week when Kirsten Edwards announced that she will cease publication of The Gift of Stitching e-zine. I was also very saddened by the fact that Martina Dey will cease sales of pdf charts and SALs because of the same problem - copyright infringement. I'm sure you've read many designer blogs of late commiserating these losses to the needlework world, and I know you're probably sighing and shaking your head and saying "here we go again, another lecture on copyright." That is not my intention today. In reading a lot of the comments on various different message boards, yahoo groups and facebook groups, I keep coming across a disturbing misconception that seems to be shared by many - that we're over-exaggerting the problem, and that most of the people who downloaded it would never have purchased it anyway. My intention is to give you a bit of data to show you how big this problem really is and a peek into the kinds of things we see every day.

Let me just get this out of the way first. It does not matter if you download a chart that you would never have purchased. The law doesn't care how many people MIGHT have bought it, theft is theft. It's like saying just because you wouldn't buy a television set in a store, it's okay to steal it - the shop wouldn't have made the sale to you anyway. See my point? Downloading a chart online illegally is no different than walking into a store and shoplifting it. In both instances you got something you didn't pay for by illegal means, whether or not you use it is immaterial. When lawyers, judges and law enforcement agencies calculate damages and criminal penalties, it is based on how many times it was downloaded, not by how many of those downloaders might have actually purchased it. 

Also on that note, there are many people downloading who WOULD have purchased things. How do I know? I follow the illegal sites and have infiltrated different private groups (some thankfully now shut down) and have watched the following conversations happen time and time again. This comment in particular comes up frequently in these private groups:

"Does anyone have this chart before I buy it?"

There's also this inevitable conversation every time Heaven and Earth Designs has a sale:

"I'm going to buy these charts in the sale and will send them to you as soon as I've got them. What's everyone else getting?" 

It's a co-ordinated effort to make sure that no two people buy the same design... and in many of these cases, the files quickly make their way from these smaller private groups to the larger download sites within a few minutes of purchase. You can always tell when there is a sale because the number of HAED designs being illegally uploaded multiplies during that time.

Another point that people are constantly throwing out there that while partly true, may not be as true as people think. The point being that stitching has declined in popularity due to the economy and lack of interest. While that IS true, the numbers aren't as substantial as people believe. YES it has contributed to a downturn in sales, but when you see membership numbers on illegal websites that are in the tens of thousands (one such site had at it's peak over a million) it makes you wonder just how many have quit stitching and how many have just stopped paying for designs. Membership numbers are climbing and new sites and sharing methods are cropping up every single day. It's not just a couple of Chinese and Russian sites, it's happening on every platform everywhere where files can be uploaded, from Facebook to blogs, photo hosting sites to web servers, p2p networks to Yahoo groups and everywhere in between.

Now on to the point of us making a big deal out of nothing. Here is some data I've collected that might make this a bit more understandable to you, and help you realize just what a big deal it is.

I'm not going to name the sites this data comes from for obvious reasons, but they are not Chinese or Russian, and the person in question is not Chinese or Russian, but American. What she's done is amass a large collection of illegal files from various membership only sites and made them available publicly via several well known file-sharing networks, some legal, some not so legal. On one network alone, she's made available to date over 10,000 different designs over a 3 year period (and I'm not even done cataloging yet), which have resulted in over (are you ready for this??) 5 million designs downloaded illegally, or approximately 500 downloads per design. Some are much higher, some are much lower, but you get the idea. The estimated losses are staggering, and I can't even give you an accurate number because many of the designs are out of print, or designers gone out of business, so I can't find out accurate dollar values on those. I actually gave up on dollar amounts after I passed ten million dollars and I wasn't even halfway through the list. However, to give you some further idea on losses, there were about 650 designs from Heaven and Earth designs alone - at approximately $15 each, each one downloaded over 500 times, well you can do the math. And those weren't included in my calculations mentioned above. This is on ONE website. She's made the same available through several other sites as well, though most of those we've been able to have removed through the co-operation of the site hosts. However, consider that the numbers on those sites, while not as high, still add to the overall figures and we're talking about a lot of money.

Still think we're over-exaggerating? This is one individual. Consider the fact that there are thousands upon thousands partaking in this same type of activity on a massive number of different kinds of sites. Heck, doing a Google search for a design sometimes brings up illegal links ahead of legal ones, which I discovered recently. What does that mean? Well Google ranks the results not only by the search criteria, but also based on the popularity of each link. When that happens it means more people are clicking on that illegal link than on the legitimate sources. So yeah, not every person who downloaded it would have bought it, but even if one in a hundred did it still adds up to a massive amount of lost revenue.

Most popular designers can expect a short lived grace period between the release of a new design and finding it on one of the popular download sites. Magazines and books can be expected on the sites as soon as they start appearing on store shelves, digital files can show up within a few short minutes of release. With books and magazines, some of these aren't even purchased before being scanned and uploaded - we've seen cases where the library stamp is visible in the scan. The more popular a design is initially, the more quickly it will appear and once it does appear and begin to propagate from site to site, sales begin to slow almost immediately. It's not just the designers who are hurt by this, but artists who would normally receive a royalty from each sale, distributors whose sales are steadily declining, and shops who are closing at an alarming pace and it is proportionate - while this is happening the membership numbers on these sites are steadily climbing as the sales are steadily dropping. The point is, once it has been uploaded even once, it WILL make it's way around the net in a matter of days.

What I can tell you is that I'm sick of seeing the excuses and justification these people use. One being that they can't afford the designs. There are lots of things I can't afford, I simply don't buy them or wait until I CAN afford them. What they can't afford is the thousands of illegal charts on their hard drive. If they actually purchased what they planned to stitch, the question of affordability becomes a little more reasonable. What makes this excuse laughable is that in one breath, a user is complaining about the cost of charts, and in another post on the same site contemplating the purchase of a $400 floor stand. Really? You can afford the $400 floor stand, but you're complaining about a $20 chart? Being able to afford it has little to do with it. On one of the sites, the administrator inadvertently made public a logfile of the people who had donated money to the site - and there were a couple listed who were donating upwards $50 a month. So they can afford $50 a month to participate in illegal downloading, but not $20 to actually buy a chart. Interesting. 

Another I often see is that they participate in sites like this because they can't get the designs where they live. Of course we all know that isn't true. There are countless businesses online who ship worldwide, so not being able to find it in a local shop on the other side of the globe isn't exactly what you'd call a problem. What they really mean is that they don't want to pay for the design and the shipping to their country. That doesn't make it alright to steal it, and it never will. If they're technically savvy enough to find that chart illegally, surely they are technically savvy enough to find and purchase it legally?

Yet another is that it's okay if charts are out of print. First, out of print does not mean out of copyright. The reason behind a chart going out of print is generally because of the cost of printing when a designer uses professional printing services. The more charts they print per batch, the less expensive it is per copy. When a chart is selling well, they will continue to get additional batches printed. When sales slow, printing an additional batch of say, 1000 charts, becomes cost prohibitive because it's unlikely they'll ever sell that many more. Printing an additional batch of say 100 charts makes the printing costs jump much higher per chart, so is also cost prohibitive in that it actually costs the designer money instead of making them a profit. Another reason is because a designer retires or quits the business. One of the reasons for a slowing of sales and designers going out of business is copyright infringement, so by participating in this activity people are actually making charts go out of print and designers go out of business more quickly than they would have otherwise. And when a designer does go out of business, the people on these sites lament that there will be no more new designs from them. Case in point, last weeks announcement from Kirsten sparked a conversation on a Chinese site about how everyone will miss the magazine, yet this same Chinese site was almost always the first place it was uploaded minutes of release. I frequently see the suggestion that designers should continue selling in pdf format to avoid the out of print issue, however this rapid "deployment" of pdf charts is the reason why most don't do that.

And finally, and probably the best one of all, that we as designers should appreciate all the free advertising we get from sites like these because they wouldn't have even known about us otherwise. Really? We should appreciate that ONE person bought our design and then gave it away to 500 other people. What is so difficult about buying it, then posting a link to where they bought it instead of "sharing" the actual chart, so that those other people could have bought it too instead of enabling them to steal it? That's what the rest of us all do and we manage to learn about new designs and designers just as easily. There are LOTS of legal sites where people can post pictures of things they're working on and tell people about them without participating in theft rings.

In all honesty, tracking and cataloging and forwarding information to the authorities is in itself a full time job - we as designers haven't got the time to keep up with it all. We watch each other's backs and do the best we can to report and report and report. We keep each other informed of developments that we come across, but it is a time consuming, overwhelming and depressing process. Sometimes the efforts pay off, sometimes they don't. But it all adds up and it takes a toll emotionally, which can really kill the creative process.

Here are some figures to help you better understand why this is crippling the industry. Let's use as an example one of my charts that retails for $20, Antique Lace. After the shop and distributor take their profit for sales, my cut is $7. The cost for me to print with my new printer is about 5 cents per page and it is around 25 pages. So now I'm at $5.75 per copy sold. Then figure in the cost to ship it to the distributor which will run me say 50 cents per copy. Now I'm at $5.25. Since it's release I have sold 45 copies of this design if I don't include those sold on consignment that I have not yet been paid for. So I've made $236.25 from this design. The floss cost me about $35, the fabric $35, and the beads $18, plus the shipping on all three, so let's round that to $100. So after materials I've made $136.25. I'm not factoring in the cost of hydro to run the computer or printer here, or the cost of getting the design framed (which I haven't because I can't afford to). Between sketches, studying lace patterns, and actually putting it into the design software, I'd estimate about 100 hours to come up with the final printed charts. I'd estimate it took me a further 300 hours to stitch the model. So 400 hours of actual work which equates to 34 cents an hour to date on this design. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy I did it, and I enjoyed it immensely, but how many people could live on that kind of money? To make minimum wage here in Ontario I'd have to sell approximately 780 charts - a far cry from the number I've actually sold. To make a liveable wage and be able to pay all my bills, that number would have to be even higher. So you can understand why I have a full time day job on top of designing. Obviously there are fluctuations here between different designers based on sales, printing methods, shipping costs, distribution methods, materials costs, model stitching, etc, but that puts things into perspective a little and maybe makes it a little easier to understand why we're freaking out so much about piracy. We have bills to pay just like everyone else, and when this behaviour begins to affect our ability to put food on the table and a roof over our heads, we get a little ticked off.

I know I will probably take some abuse for voicing all of this but I really am tired of hearing how we're making a big deal out of nothing. We're not talking about a small percentage of people who partake in these activities, the number is HUGE and growing at an alarming pace. 

In closing, I wish to express my sympathies to Kirsten and Martina. I know these decisions can't have been easy.