The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #134667   Message #3067908
Posted By: Howard Jones
05-Jan-11 - 02:53 PM
Thread Name: Copyrighting A Traditional Song
Subject: RE: Copyrighting A Traditional Song
This page on the PRS website explains about arrangements.

Simply singing a song "your way" is unlikely to create an arrangement for purposes of copyright. However, working up a text of a song from different versions and/or adding an instrumental backing probably will do. It depends on how much original work you've added to the piece, and the copyright applies only to that original work - the traditional piece itself remains non-copyright.