This is something I’ll never understand.  Why is knitting so much more popular and apparently “better” than crochet?  Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against knitting, in fact I’d like to try and learn to knit myself.  I just don’t see why there’s such a huge difference in opinion between the two.  Yes, there are differences, but each craft has its own unique plusses and projects.

Knitting:

With knitting, you use 2 needles and you can generally make more clothing-type items, as the fabric you get with knitting is thinner than that with crochet.  However, there are only a few different types of stitches.  You can make a large variety of things with these stitches though.

Crochet:

While you can’t make as many different types of clothes with crochet as with knit, there are a few patterns around for very nice crocheted clothes.  There are also unlimited afghan and stuffed toys patterns with crochet.  Crochet has a lot more types of stitches than knit, so you can get a lot more textures and patterns with crochet.

Overall, I personally feel that each craft has its own unique possibilities, and that they are equally fun and productive.

Most of us remember a few years ago when the music industry started heavily focusing on pirated music, what’s legal, what’s not, what to do about pirates.  As a result, sites like WinMX were shut down, sites like Napster became paid-for services, but some sites like BitTorrent and Limewire stayed afloat somehow.  In this case, it’s fairly obvious that yes, directly copying a song and distributing could be seen as thievery, because many people receive the music for free.

Case 2: Song Tabs

Another situation dealing with copyright issues in music is tablature of the songs.  Several years ago, there were three big tab websites: Ultimate Guitar, MXTabs, and Taborama.  In late 2005, tabs of copyrighted music were declared illegal, and some sites, like Taborama and MXTabs were taken down, while others, like Ultimate Guitar paid licensing fees.  The tabs were decided to be illegal because they were reproductions of songs being distributed for free.  Some sites fought this, and MXTabs, for example, relaunched in 2006, but has yet to fully open and make tabs available. 

Case 3: Craft Patterns

I was browsing a crochet forum when I came across this post.  While I was not surprised to see people trying to make money off other people’s patterns, it was still distressing.  As time wore on, the topic came across another forum distributing free translated patterns of other people’s free patterns.  This also became a big controversy.  On one hand, I don’t see why the people couldn’t just give a link back to the original pattern, which would alleviate any issues.  On the other hand, I have trouble seeing how translating an already free pattern for non-English speaking crafters constitutes such a big problem.

Where’s the line?