This is what I've been trying to say all along Jim.

Under your widely accepted but NOT exclusive definition of the word Traditional, there is no problem or issue about ownership. The material that exists within your definition of the word is all out of copyright and in common ownership.

But as we can see from this discussion, that is not understood or respected by all of the folk community.

A lot of other people have decided, for good or bad reasons, that the word traditional NOW means something else; something more general, more continuous - and generally open to a MUCH wider interpretation.

You can decry this, but it's happened. And the cat will never fit back into the bottle.

So. When the term Traditional is applied in this second way it can and often will include works which are either still in legal copyright, or which deserve, morally, to still be associated with a maker's name (it's not only about money, its also about respect - as I've said before - think O'Carolan for example).

Yet because people believe that it's ok to do what you like with traditional materal (because that's what your gang are telling them) and what the law seems to imply, and anyway its only folk and it's all everybody's anyway, the result is artists feel free to use copyright material without consent or credit, denying rightful royalties, making ownership hard to re-establish, and devaluing the contribution made by original thought to music.

It is this confusion that I want to end by dropping the word Trad.

We need ONE word to descripe the thing your talking about. And DIFFERENT word to decribe what Soldier Boy (and perhaps now a majority of people in the folk world) are takling about.

Now you can hang onto your definition if you like, but you'll have to stop all the others using it, and I think it's just too late for that - don't you?