I believe that most of the people who are creating patterns so that others can make beautiful quilts from all of the amazing fabric that is available to us are working independently. They are not employed by big companies and earning a salary by designing for them. They are people who count on the sales of their patterns as their income or they work another job and supplement their income by following their passion for creating and sharing it with the world.
There is so much work that goes into a pattern before it is ever published. It is not a simple or fast process. I have patterns sitting in my computer that are one step away from being published but for one reason or another are still on hold. There is a very real possibility that I may never get around to publishing them. I am lucky if I publish 4 patterns a year. There are no guarantees that other people will like your design so, even though you've put your heart and soul into creating it, you might never earn a penny from it.
I am not a marketing genius nor am I with any distributors at this time, so most of my sales come when someone sees one of my designs in a post on Facebook and asks where they can get the pattern.
Unfortunately there is an alarming trend that I am seeing more and more often. Designers are losing control of their designs and therefore they are losing sales. Someone will purchase a downloadable copy of a pattern and create a website of their own. Once they have that file they can upload it to their website and claim it as their own design. They may change the name of the design, or in many cases not even bother to do that, but it remains the same as the original and they use the written directions that the legal owner of the design wrote. I get asked often if my designs are available as a download but this is the very reason I choose not to sell my designs this way. If someone wants to steal a design from me they will find a way but I'm not going to make it easier for them.
These websites pop up on a daily basis and designers are constantly being made aware of their designs being sold by someone else without permission. Fighting back is very difficult as it can be hard to shut these sites down. If you do manage to shut it down, you will see it again under a different name very soon.
Pattern buyers have all of the power in this situation. Instead of taking the easy route and purchasing from the first link you see, a simple Google image search can lead you to the legal owner of the design in most cases. I know it's an extra step but pattern designers have already done so much work to make the pattern available to the buyers that it can be disheartening to see what should be your profits from your work going to someone else who has done nothing more than purchase a domain name.
These websites have a similar look that becomes easily recognizable if you familiarize yourself with it. It is a simple design that shows the quilt designs, and very often, there is a sizable discount offered on each of the patterns.
I know that we're all shopping around for the best deals these days but stealing or helping someone else steal is not the answer. People should be paid for their work.
