Your tartan design rights

You may use our online Tartan Designer for any reasonable purpose, free-of-charge and without restriction. We impose no conditions on how you use any original tartan designs you create. This applies to all designs in our system, including retrospectively. Only when you commission its production as physical weaving does it become your copyright design, subject to our licensing conditions. Any such copyright claim can only ever be provisional, and contingent upon no one else establishing a prior claim to the same design elsewhere. Note that until a design is recorded as a formal design by being physically produced, any other user can freely copy and commission its production, thereby becoming its legal ‘owner’. We strongly advise that you think carefully before openly publishing in the Gallery any design you think you may later wish to physically produce.

Your designs are kept private by default. But you can choose to share them in our Gallery or via social sharing. Any tartan design you publish in the Gallery or otherwise make visible to third parties is published freely. Unless and until you commission its production as woven fabric or in similar physical form, you waive all legal rights over any design you create in our systems.

We believe in tartan as an open and inclusive heritage belonging to and uniting humankind, rather than as a tool to divide and exclude. So if you publish your design in our Gallery, even once you have commissioned the physical production of a tartan design and thereby established your copyright, by saving and/or publishing a new tartan design using this system, you are deemed to be putting it into the public domain, with the protection of the ‘Attribution Non-commercial’ Creative Commons license. See http://creativecommons.org/ In summary, this allows anyone to copy, adapt, or use your design for any non-commercial purpose, provided they credit their use back to you. Our system effects this automatically. So by participating in our Gallery system you will be given credit for your creativity (as identified by whatever screen name you set for yourself within our systems) but no rights to restrict others from making use of the same design.

Unless and until you otherwise notify us in writing, stating that you wish another weaver to have the exclusive right to produce a tartan design you have had physically produced, by producing any design in our system you are also granting Scotweb permission to weave or otherwise use this design commercially. We would normally expect only ever to do this on your behalf. But should anyone else wish us to weave the tartan you have designed, we would have the right to do so without further permission. If you wish a tartan you have designed in our system and then had woven elsewhere to be exclusively produced by another weaver, you should notify us in writing, including a full reference to your design in our system including its name and design number. We will then identify it online as Restricted, and will not weave it ourselves. In the absence of such notification, we assume you are happy for us to weave any design in our system, whether it is known to have been woven or not.

Whenever someone commissions the production of a tartan design in our system, we will run an automated check to ensure an identical pattern (or name) has not already been recorded. This means that no one else will be able to record an identical tartan to yours thereafter in our systems.

When you register, we ask you for contact details. Should we ever attempt to contact you via these details and receive no response within a reasonable period, then all copyright and other rights pertaining to your designs will be deemed to have been passed to Scotweb Marketing Ltd.