Needlepoint Nappers
By Michael Swaine
And if you choose to take that path
Would you come to make me pay?
—"Pineapple Head" by Neil Finn
Go ahead, hide your baseball cards. Lock your secret recipe file. It won't do you any good. In the very near future, we'll all be Napsterized.
Movies, software, the immortal prose of computer columnists, nothing is immune to copying and sharing by legions of Internet-savvy intellectual property traffickers. Your intellectual property is next. I know that, because now the phenomenon has reached into a preserve that no one expected: grandma's knitting basket.
As reported in an Associated Press (AP) story, needlepoint and cross-stitch enthusiasts have started swapping patterns online. A Web-based community of pattern swappers has emerged, and sales of patterns are way down as a result. The pattern owners, facing thousands of dollars of lost revenue, are threatening lawsuits.
But they'll have to find the culprits first. Alerted by the threats, the Pattern Piggies have gone underground. You can't find the group online without a personal recommendation and a password, sort of like visiting a speakeasy during Prohibition. The group has even changed its name to evade detection.
"They're hackers," one pattern owner told the AP. "I don't care that they are grandmothers. They're bootlegging us out of business."
They're not hackers, of course. Hackers are either very clever programmers or people who break into computer systems, depending on which dictionary you click.
