See the answer to this question. There is no copyright in a \”technique\”, although there may be copyright in the written instructions or diagrams used to teach this technique. If a technique or a way of doing something is to be protected, it must be protected under patent or trade secret law.
Now, there are some people who may take the position that only the person who introduced this technique has a right to share it, or that it cannot be shared without permission or giving credit. This is a moral position, not a legal position, and it\’s often applied in the absence of complete facts. How do you know that an individual is the progenitor of a particular knitting technique? Perhaps that person was the first person to write about or teach an organized class on the technique, but that does not give the person legal title to the technqiue.
If you wish to contemplate the moral issue, consider these two positions:
- A teacher\’s view might be that she has invested her effort and skill into developing a new technique. People pay to be taught by her. If these people start teaching others for free, what\’s left for her?
- On the other hand, what about the public? If the teacher did not take steps to obtain an exclusive right to use this technique (if she didn\’t apply for a patent or have her students agree to keep the technique confidential), why should the public be penalized? Should the rest of the world be deprived of free knowledge, simply because the teacher wants to maintain her income? Besides, maybe the value in her classes is not that she teaches this particular technique, but that she teaches it well.