One of the problems is that what you wish to call making your living, others want to call contributing to the corpus called 'folk'. Then they take some sense of a collective ownership over the material, so they do not wish you to assert your reasonable individual right to get paid for part of what you do instead of earning some other way i.e. write songs sometimes. Why should songs (always made up in my belief initially by some individual) be owned publically when land can be owned privately? Yes, it's the same Hokey Cokey. The only reason Kennedy gets all the monies in the UK is because it is no-one's job to assert the public right when the initial creator (very possibly British) cannot be identified, and anyway his family's private right to collect on the song will have expired by now. I'd consider whether to argue that we need an investigative body to sort out who wrote these things, except that life is overloaded with such people already, and they inevitably misuse their power - see the starting point of this thread!