@dtms43 wrote:
I just came across a knitted pattern for a shawl, its free on the internet but listed here for $6:00 is this fraud.
Fraud is deliberately deceiving someone, usually for monetary gain - there's not actually enough info here to determine if the seller is being fraudulent, but the act of charging money for something that can be gained for free elsewhere is not in itself fraud (a clearer example would be some restaurants charge money for a glass of water, some don't - a patron can be offended by being charged for a glass of water, but they aren't being defrauded).
Now, if the seller claimed things like "exclusive" or "not available anywhere else" etc, that's getting a bit closer to fraud.
Also, if the pattern is protectected by copyright and the seller is not the copyright holder, while not exactly fraud it is a breach of copyright laws. However where public domain content is concerned, or content that has a CC license which includes commercial use, the seller isn't doing anything wrong.
There are other pertinent things to consider as well - presumably the free version is a downloadable PDF or similar, but does the eBay listing offer a physical product? This is also quite a common practice - Open Office, for example, which is a software suite similar to Microsoft Office, is 100% free to download, but they also allow anyone to create phyisical installation discs etc and sell them (reason being, some people want the software but might not be able to download it). Other people often create collections of public domain content and sell them, which is basically providing a service (research etc) as well as a physical product, which obviously has value. A common example of that is either physical or digital image collages, sized for specific purposes.
