"that's not how Handy operated" Being predatory was so ordinary in the class system back then that when Leighton brothers types lifted material from Rabbit Brown types, it was _each other_ they worried about possibly taking them to court, not the Rabbit Brown types. That all goes back to people like Brahms and Liszt and how they sometimes got upset at each other about which wealthy gentleman owned what tune, which one of them had learned from some street musician -- same mentality.