Frugal Corner has ISLE OF SKYE!!!!!

[ChromeScholar]

I suspect that the licensing question will be brought to someone official's attention fairly soon. If they aren't licensed kilt, they will be off the market fairly soon. If they still have it for sale when I have the money for another kilt, I will probably buy one. Otherwise, there are other tartans on my list.

[Mike1]

Facts, gentlemen. Bring some facts to the table, else this thread is going to go away. Enough of the speculation already.

[pipesndrumsnun]

Facts, gentlemen. Bring some facts to the table, else this thread is going to go away. Enough of the speculation already.

Please, Mike, make it go away! Make it go away!!!

[Alan H]

Facts, gentlemen. Bring some facts to the table, else this thread is going to go away. Enough of the speculation already.

HEAR, HEAR! Enough of the speculation. I Hope that the next post is by a representative of Frugal Corner, and that we all leave this thread ALONE until then.

I know that I'm going to NOT POST IN THIS THREAD AGAIN until we hear from FC.

[M. A. C. Newsome]

I suspect that the licensing question will be brought to someone official's attention fairly soon. If they aren't licensed kilt, they will be off the market fairly soon. If they still have it for sale when I have the money for another kilt, I will probably buy one. Otherwise, there are other tartans on my list.

Not necessarily. To bring in an example from another proprietary tartan, the Pride of Scotland tartan is a design well known to be owned by McColls of Aberdeen. I know that in the past they were having this tartan produced by Lochcarron of Scotland, and that for a while Lochcarron was making it available to all of their retailors.

However, at some point about two years ago (if memory serves) Lochcarron stopped supplying it, at the request of McColls. Whether they still produce it for McColls or if McColls is now having it produced elsewhere, I have no idea.

But my point in this is that the Pride of Scotland tartan was being sold everywhere. Just do an Ebay search and see what comes up. McColls was attempting, as best they could, to control the production and sale of one of their proprietary designs. Other companies, many of which were owned and operated outside of the UK, were copying their design and making profit off of it. Last I heard, McColls was trying their best to crack down on this, which amounts to theft of their privately held corporate design.

The fact that the Pride of Scotland is still widely available on Ebay and elsewhere is testimony to the fact that there is only so much a UK company can do legally to protect itself against this kind of intellectual property theft by companies based in Pakistan or China, selling their products to the USA or elsewhere.

I'm using this as an example to illustrate that even IF (and it is an "if) the company supplying FC does not have permission to produce this design, and IF the copyright owners are made aware of the situation and attempt to take action, the reality is that there may be very little they can effectively do.

It boils down to this -- there is a difference between what is right and what you can get away with.

This conversation may seem to be getting very messy to some, but it brings up some serious points about our moral responsibility as consumers. In general, the question of whether or not a tartan is copyrighted, or who owns that copyright, is not going to be an issue for those of us purchasing and wearing the tartans. Tartan copyright has absolutely no bearing on who can wear the tartan -- only who can produce and/or sell it.

In the following statements I am not referring to any single company, but rather making general observations that I think are applicible anywhere.

Generally, the consumer takes it on faith that the person they are buying their goods from has obtained any permission that may be necessary and won't ever have to worry about it.

However, when put into a situation where there is either sure knowledge, or a reasonable suspicion, that the retailor or manufacturer may be supplying something illicitly, then it does become a personal moral delimma for the consumer -- do I purchase this anyway and support this company with my dollars, or don't I?

A good example -- last summer while doing some work out in my yard, a rather rag-tag looking man pulled up in a pick-up truck and offered to sell me a variety of tools and hardware (all in new packaging) that he had loaded in his truck bed. He told me he drove up from South Carolina because his "manager" told him he needed to sell this surplus "inventory" today. Yeah right. I had every reason to believe that these were stolen goods. And while there is nothing objectively wrong with me buying a tool from a private individual, in this case I could be reasonably sure that by doing so I would be monetarily supporting an illegal and immoral activity and I could not in good conscious be a participant in that. I politely declined and the person drove on.

There is such a thing as "consumer ethics" and I think this thread, at its heart, is dealing with these questions.