McCandlish Tartans Now Public Domain

After 30 years of asserting a copyright over them, I have released the McCandlish/McCandless tartans into the public domain (no longer copyrighted), as of 9 May 2023.

The establishment of the Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT) – and the fact that the textile industry takes it seriously – obviates any further need to protect the designs from being usurped for some other name or organization. The tartans’ entries in the SRT are no longer flagged as “restricted” or requiring any kind of permission.

This should make it much easier to get McCandlish tartan woven and kilts made.

It’s also “future-proof”. With the tartans formerly marked as copyright-restricted in SRT, weavers were demanding proof of permission to do the weaving. But if I were to die, then that permission would forever be unobtainable. Now that’s no longer a concern.

Vendors on the Web and at Highland games events are now also free to make and sell McCandlish-tartan items without any hindrance.

[image of some of the tartans]

By Stanton McCandlish

I am the Cuindlis.org site administrator and presently its principal writer/researcher. Based in Oakland, California (though I spent my early childhood in the UK, and have also lived in five US states, as well as Ontario, Canada), I am an IT consultant, book author, and genealogist, I've been doing a one-name study of Cuindlis-derived names like McCandlish, McCanless, and Conlisk since the 1990s. I also designed the McCandlish tartans, back in 1992 (with consultation from one of the then-living tartan experts). I have a degree in cultural anthropology and linguistics. I'm learning Scottish Gaelic and previously studied Irish Gaelic a bit, though am not fluent in either yet. On the side, I'm also something of a tartan and Highland-dress scholar, and have amassed most of the quality material published on the subject, primarily for overhauling Wikipedia's coverage of the subject. I started with the article "Tartan", which I re-did from the ground up and will next be splitting into sub-articles. Other family lines I'm researching including Skinner, Foster, Bomar, Ward, and Scott, though only particular lineages (not as broad one-name studies).

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