I have seen many other people designing new tartans and posting their work here. I'm inclined to do the same, but based on the information I have found on the Scotweb website (related to their Tartan Designer software) I'm a bit skittish.

If I understand the information on the Scotweb website correctly, the act of designing a tartan and fixing it in some kind of image format is not sufficient to give the designer the copyright to the tartan. Instead they must commission a woven length of cloth in the tartan they've designed. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me, as it's my understanding that according to international convention the act of publishing a creative work in any format is sufficient to assign the copyright to the creator of the work.

I can understand that, if I designed a tartan with alternating black and yellow stripes of equal width, not much creativity was involved. On the other hand, if I spent several hours working on a fairly complex tartan to get it to look esthetically pleasing, how is that much different from spending the same amount of time drawing a picture of a spaceship or whatnot in Photoshop or the GIMP?

Furthermore, it's my understanding (again from reading Scotweb's site) that, if I displayed my design publicly, if someone else saw it and liked it, and if that person was the first to commission a woven length of cloth in that tartan, they would hold the copyright to the design. Money trumps creativity and authorship? That doesn't seem just to me.

Or does tartan fall under trademark law rather than copyright law? I doubt that's the case, ordinarily.

I realize this verges on soliciting legal advice, but I think, given the number of ordinary people who are creating tartans nowadays, that some clarity on these matters is due, perhaps from people who have designed, registered, and commissioned tartans.

Or maybe I just need to wait for this article to be finished, which "will be appearing here shortly" ever since the STA website was redesigned—about a year ago, was it?