Here in the West of Ireland we are in the process of establishing a county-wide heritage organisation, including a sound and manuscript archive and a reference library, mainly of traditional material (music, song, story, lore, oral history etc). The current popularity of and serious respect for Irish music has made it possible to apply for and get substantial government grants for such projects. We don't know how this will be effected by the current economic situation, but to date we have purchased a house and enough equipment to get us up and running. We have also been awarded a number of grants for acquiring and archiving both sound, manuscript an published material.
Some of us have been acquiring collections of recordings for decades for various workshops and clubs we have been involved in and we have donated copies to the new organisation, which has enabled it to hit the ground running - so to speak. Local people have been magnificent in donating private recordings, photographs etc to our rapidly expanding collection.
Hopefully, some time this year we will be up and running, with a fully operational and equipped visitors centre and access to our collection through our web-site (once we have sorted out the practical and 'ethical' nuts-and-bolts).
There is a Dublin based organisation whose brief is to assist in the setting up of organisations such as ours; without their help we would still be floundering in the shallows.
Who said folk music is just about having fun and getting pissed each week!!!
My wife and I have spent the last thirty odd years recording some of the last of the older generation of singers, storytellers and musicians. The abiding impression we have come away with during that time has been the breathtaking and eye-watering generosity of those people, many of them on and below the poverty line, with their time, material, knowledge, opinions and experiences. Without them, and people like them, we would have nothing. I can never remember anybody we met saying "you can't have that, that's mine".
In the light of their attitude to what they have given us, I find the idea of somebody copyrighting an 'arrangement' of a folk song extremely distasteful, dishonest and above all, incredibly petty (are these songs really worth so much as to have to lock them away in a safe?) All folk music, by its very nature, is somebody's arrangement. If our field singers, storytellers and musicians had taken the line of 'ownership' displayed here and elsewhere our songs and music would have disappeared centuries ago; as Norfolk traditional singer Walter Pardon once told us "They're not my songs, they're everybodys".
Jim Carroll