Registering a new tartan

[roy croft]

Roy,

If I can point out ---

Registering a Tartan is one thing. The registering body, whether you use The Scottish Register or The Scottish Tartans Authority, on recognizes that your design as unique, not a copy of something someone else has done. The registering body is also confirming that your chosen name meets the criteria. For example you cannot name a Tartan after a company without that companies approval of some sort.

Restricting a Tartan is something totally different. Many Tartans have been copyrighted by their designers. In some cases this is to protect intellectual property. In some cases it is simply to record the name of the designer.
Some other restrictions could be what mill is authorized to weave it. In this case you are choosing the weaving mill that will give you the yarn colors and Sett size you intend.
Some Tartans carry restrictions on who is authorized to wear it. An example would be a Tartan for a club.

Making a Tartan "official" is quite a different ball of wax.
Let me give you an example of these -

I designed the Victoria, City of Gardens Tartan. The Tartan was my gift to my adopted city.
I registered it with both the SRT and the STA. I sent in a swatch to be kept in the Scottish Archives.

When I registered the design I restricted it to be woven by the mill that I had the original weaving done with. I wanted all subsequent weavings to be the same colors and Sett Size.

That was step one.

Step two was presenting my design, along with a competing design, to the Victoria City Council for their vote. I'm happy to say that they chose my design. I have a letter signed by the Mayor stating that my design is now the "Official" Tartan of the City of Victoria, BC Canada.
I had to then submit a copy of the Mayors letter to both Registration bodies so that they could update their web listing.

And finally I took out a Copyright on my design to protect my intellectual property.


There is no requirement to do any of these steps.

Hi, Steve.

Thanks for your explanation. I'm pretty clear on the difference between registration and restriction. I want to focus on registering it first so that I can control restrictions on it. Where this is coming from is that the tartan I've been working on is one I had been discussing with a couple other folks, and both the colors themselves and the sequence in the sett have meaning. Someone from an official association found out about the conversations and thinks that the association might want to adopt the tartan and restrict it. My goal is to prevent that. I have no problem, of course, with their designing their own and restricting it in any way that they wish.

I've spent much of my career in software development/deployment, and I'm an advocate for both open source and proprietary software. I think people have the right to protect their intellectual property any way they want to, and I also think people have the right to give it away if they want to. My problem is with people who try to tell others what they can or should do with their intellectual property.

This association has no involvement with my tartan design other than hearing about it and thinking they want to "own" it. All I want in the end is for anyone to be able to use it. I don't care if it's in any way "official."

It seems that I should focus on registering it to ensure that nobody else registers one first that is similar enough to preclude my ability to do so. Please let me know if that seems an odd way of looking at it.

Slàinte!