Perhaps the most underreported area of copyright infringement in the last decade has been in the home craft and stitching community. The needlepointers have made wholesale, unauthorized copies of patterns; the garment and accessory (patterns which in the ’60’s we paid handsomely to meet our home economics and merit badge requirements) bespoke community have made unauthorized copies galore; and now we have a case involving those plastic cards that we pop into our high tech modern sewing machines.

The Eighth Circuit recently affirmed summary judgement for the craft store that was renting the plastic, memory cards from which the sewing machine takes the direction for producing the embroidery designs. Action Tapes, Inc. V. Mattson (Nos. 05-3309m 05-3520 (8th Cir. Aug 30, 2006).)

The plaintiff, Action Tapes, failed to register the computer software and the requisite source code in the Copyright Office under the 1990 Computer Software Rental Amendments Act.

This, a case of first impression, gives a good map of where the next software embroidery designs plaintiff needs to go to succeed next time.

This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.