"Items made from this pattern can only be used for personal or charitable use'" "You can not sell items made from this pattern," "You can only use items made from this pattern as gifts or for personal use," "By buying this pattern you agree to not sell the items for personal gain."
Did you know that's all bullshit? This is a subject that really gets my hackles up. Even though I have never had any personal problems with this myself, I've seen people who have. I cannot write a post about patterns and copyrights that anyone could stand to read, so I had my husband do it for me. He's farther removed from the subject and wrote a post you wouldn't be embarrassed to read to your grandmother:
"It’s pretty easy to get started on crochet or
knitting – all you really need are some hooks or needles, a skein of
your favorite color, and a pattern to guide you. And while you can get
all of that at a local craft store, it’s easy to
have some confusion on what you can do with your new handmade treasure
after you’re done. It’s an easy question to ask – what exactly is and
is not legal to do with an object that you’ve created based on someone
else's pattern?
Fortunately, the answer is pretty simple – you
can do anything you want. You can sell the object online, with or
without your own changes, and make a profit in any way you see fit.
Despite what a pattern’s author may tell you, it is fully
legal to create objects from their patterns and distribute them however
you like. While there are some restrictions on the pattern itself,
once you have gotten the pattern from a book, Ravelry, Etsy, or any
other source in a legal way, you can make and sell anything
you want.
Certainly, you’ll do a service to the community
if you credit the source of your finished good to the author of the
pattern. The more attention a pattern author gets, the more likely they
are to make more patterns to be enjoyed. From
a strictly legal sense though, you own the object and all of the rights
that surround it. The U.S. Supreme Court even sent down a ruling on
this very issue to explicitly state that it is OK to alter and/or sell your items.
You can find lots more information with answers to all the questions you might ask at this great page:
http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/CopyrightLaw/Patterns.shtml
So get out there and get hooking!"
Just to be clear: You CANNOT claim a PATTERN as your own and distribute it in any way.
Granted you'd probably get a bad reputation in your yarn art community for selling things you made. Crochet and knit communities seem especially bad about harassing people for committing perfectly legal acts, when in reality they don't have a leg to stand on.
