'Folk' has gone, Richard - let it go. No-one's hi-jacking it, it just changed over time like every other word, in every language, ever. ('Wicked', for example). You can't expect a flawed definition from 50 years ago to hold water today.

Yes, people should be encouraged to add an adjective whenever possible, to reduce confusion, but 'Folk' as a name for the whole genre is now accepted and universally understood.

The real problem lies in the definition of 'T/traditional' - because the definition of this word is not universal.

At the moment two groups are claiming it as definitive (the 'closed' and 'open' groups), and those two definitions are in conflict. Then there's the third defintion used by PRS and the Courts, which overlaps with the other two, adding further confusion.

The consequence of all this is that writers sometimes go uncredited, royalties sometimes go unpaid (or are paid wrongly) and valuable historical information is sometimes lost - plus people are misled into taking a unique and very special process fror granted