Balmoral is then a "private" family pattern and therefore is not in the public domain. There are loads of those. I was looking at a Tartan registry recently and I was wondering who/what I might find under the letter "Z". There is a local media impresario here named Moses Zniamer who lo and behold had commissioned a tartan for himself that, of course is not in the public domain. I suppose you can argue that Macintosh is also a private family pattern but ...

My own heritage connecting no further back than my grandparents indicates that I should wear one of six major tartan patterns (one of which is Macintosh). Another one is Stewart. Now, there is hardly a square yard of dry ground on this Earth that does not have spiders or something with a Royal Stewart tartan on it. It is a nice tartan. I am not likely to wear it just because there are so many other Stewart variants that I find are so beautiful. Royal Stewart is definitely in the public domain as is Macintosh. We even had a brand of toffee that was sold like chocolate bars around here when I was a child that were wrapped in the Macintosh tartan. Why not? If that insults a Macintosh, so would all sorts of other minutae and I wouldn't even bother answering the miserable old ...