Why Cyrillic?

Yet again, I’m just going to admit that I am hopelessly out of touch and not 133t.

Why do communities like StitchHome post everything in Cyrillic? I mean, it might really be Russian or some such language, but I can tell that it uses Cyrillic characters. That’s all I know for sure.

I know some of the patterns are scanned in from copyrighted materials. Do they think to not be noticed this way? I know I’ve run across a fair number of “pirate” sites on Russian servers for whatever reason.

Is this an online subculture I just haven’t noticed much? Big cross-stitch pattern pirates?