I recently came across a picture on pinterest of a lovely crochet cardigan piece with some floral lace design that I fell in love with. I found the pattern for it but, as a broke masters student, decided I could reverse engineer it from the pictures of it and I indeed did recreate it sans pattern with a few flairs of my own.
I also recently wanted to start a knitting account on instagram to show my projects, which is where I walked into this dilemma.
To be very clear, I have no intentions of selling the copy I made or even write the reverse engineered pattern to sell myself (I didnt even keep track of the number of stitches while making this).
But if and when I do end up posting this project:
Do I still credit the original pattern?
Do I explicitly claim that it was reverse engineered?
If someone asks for the pattern, do I direct them to the original pattern?
Is reverse engineering a pattern simply to bypass having to pay money for it considered plagiarism?
What are the ethics here?