At least when they claim copyright on a trad song, they're not ripping off the author, and if push comes to shove, they can't make it stick.

I'm with PC and JMcL when they complain about songs that they have written that are claimed by others - or even attributed to "Trad." The really irritating thing about much of this is not the loss of the royalties and the possibility of fraud - because that's what it is (I can say that - they're not my royalties!). It's the the way it demonstrates that somebody has been grossly careless in their attention to detail, and that they don't really know as much as they should about their material. In the folk music field, I'd expect people to care about their songs enough to know where they came from.