When you bring your talent to the world, you've got to let it fly...

Sharing seems to be the word 'à la mode' on Planet Bead; it pops up in many a blog post and on social platforms.

For some persons, sharing their knowledge is a panicking idea, because they might not catch the deeper message.
Sharing is not about giving away creative ideas or designs. It is about avoiding a monopoly of techniques, and letting it evolve. Maybe sharing is not the right word.

Clearly, it is everybody's right to choose what they want to make 'public' or not. However, it should be commonly accepted that as soon as a stitch goes out into the world, the stitch becomes everyone's, to play with, to develop, and go beyond limits. That's what it's all about.

Techniques are not copyrightable. You cannot refuse the right to another one to use a particular technique. It's fortunate, because if we didn't have the right to use the techniques, we would not be beading at all.

An example why is it better to share technique:

This square is a 4-pointed 'triangle'

If the 'owner' of the beaded triangle refused to Planet Bead the right to use the nifty threadpath, then CGB Vol. I and absolutely all the other marvellous things which resulted from the nifty threadpath, would not exist. Also, the clever brain who developed this thread path would never have enough of a lifetime to create 1% of what has been made by beaders all over the world with it. Apart from a triangle, the technique can be used for anything. Without it, my Jalisco Bangle would not exist. Ishtar Collar would not exist. Entire books would not exist. Tons of designs would not exist. Not fun.

Why are we so concerned about this matter? Because of this:

This star is an addition of several
4-pointed 'triangles'

The problem of intellectual property brought Computer Science to a scary level of blockage because nobody could use this or that sequence or code anymore (there are gazillions of companies and persons who have patented their little sequence). This or that tiny bit of piece of electronics in their machine is someone else's property, so making something with it becomes that someone else's property.  It takes lawyers huge amounts of time to verify 'if this particular sequence or code had not already been patented'. Young talented future engineers were (are?) completely stuck, and could not move on and create because of this monstruous hijack of Mathematics (because in the end, it is just a certain way of using numbers). This problem might have been solved in the meantime, which I hope, but it illustrates exactly what we, beaders, do not want to happen on Planet Bead.

Jalisco is a 10-pointed 'triangle'

Note that seed beads and mathematics are very similar in nature due to their geometric shape.

Creatives who find a way of making something and who refuse the right to others to use it even if those others find out by themselves how to do it, or a variation, can simply not show their work. However, they better be open to the possibility that another brilliant someone could have the same ideas. 8 billions of human brains on Earth, that is a lot of potential. It happens to me all the time.

We all inspire each other. We all work with the same material. As designers, we know that the stitches are not ours, but what we make with it, is. And when others take it and make it evolve, we have to let it go...