Hey, I'm jumping in on this thread as it's a worry of mine.
Slightly off-topic, but related in some way: a few weeks ago, I came across someone selling a crochet pattern on Ebay that they had taken from a WalMart store. It was one of those free Red Heart patterns that you can take, even if you don't buy any of their yarn. You know the ones I mean, the ones that hang by the yarn and are pull-off's? I couldn't believe it. If I'm not mistaken, they were getting over $5.00 for it. You can just bet that they received some very bad feedback from the buyer. But to make it worse, the seller of the auction gave neg. feedback to the buyer and said, "The ad clearly states it was a pattern from WalMart." Can you believe the NERVE?
And about 3 months before that, there was a thread on Craftster about a woman selling links to other people's FREE websites for crochet patterns. I KNOW, can you BELIEVE THAT? Her scam was to sell the links as one auction. The buyer would pay about $10 for the links. Then, after buying, she'd send them a list of the links, which any fool could go GOOGLE or DOGPILE and find for FREEEEee! I checked her feedback and she was doing well enough. That one I had to report. It wasn't as though she was giving kick-backs to the sites she was making money from.
I've done copyright research (loads of it) and even though the patterns are sold in a book (or a pamplet..same difference) you can't break them up and sell them individually as copies.
At some point, those selling illegally will get caught.