A little reality check here, folks, about Copyright Law and Public Domain. The Digital Tradition and Mudcat Forum can't sit back and assume that just because we're dealing with folk music, that the bulk of our material is Public Domain. Copyright and Intellectual Property Law is a very complex field.

All the songs formally on the DT and informally in the Forum have been submitted from one of these sources: remembered lyrics, transcriptions off recordings or transcriptions from printed sources. Any one of these sources of material could have a formal copyright attached (including remembered lyrics!)

Unless the person who submitted the lyrics also submitted the complete provenance of their sources, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to track down copyright. Even traditional songs can carry copyright if they are a particular version - John Jacob Niles copyrighted "his" versions of Child ballads, etc. Whether this is morally "right" or not matters not a whit in a court of law; if a particular set of lyrics is copyrighted as "Trad./Arranged by...", it still has a valid copyright in the Court's view. If the lyrics are transcribed from printed material - "Sing Out!", Gale Huntington's "Songs the Whalermen Sang", the Dover edition of Child's ballads, whatever, there can be a copyright holder of note for the collection, if not the individual song.

HFA is certainly able to obtain the complete "list" of what is in the DT's database without Max giving them a physical list. However, they will have to examine each entry, piece by piece, and see if it matches a copyrighted version somewhere. Unfortunately, in order to legally protect ourselves from actionable claims, we need to do the same thing. It will involve a tremendous amount of work, especially since many, many of the submissions to the DT came without provenance.

If the note from "A Publisher" is any indication, HFA and/or those publishers may eventually be willing to work with us to establish clear boundaries and limits - at least, that is what I read into this passage from his/her posting:

"You see, your site is only one of literally THOUSANDS that we publishers send HFA/NMPA to on a DAILY basis. The truth is, what NMPA is doing is at the request of the publishers that own the vast majority of copyrights in the U.S. and they have a very small staff and little funding to accomplish this. However, this is a very serious matter that cannot be ignored. This is probably why they come across as more heavy-handed than this site, in particlar, may warrant.

They've dealt with an enormous number of downright abusive and angry people who are willfully and blatantly seeking to thumb their noses at copyright law - and who post extensive databases of current, money-making lyrics. I do not see that as being the case here, but no-one at NMPA has the time necessary to do the searching which I have just done at this site. In fact, it is extremely rare that I have this much time. "

I have long been a stickler for citing sources when people post lyrics to the DT. In the long run, it may help us come to a resolution of this issue that is satisfactory to both parties. Getting angry isn't going to help as much as getting busy in trying to improve the DT to make it a reference site to be proud of.

Maybe we could start by sorting the DT by contributor, sending contributors a list of their entries, and ask each contributor to fill in the appropriate source info for each entry - which book, recording, performing artist, etc. this particular version of this particular song came from. We would then have an easier time going to the correct artist or copyright holder to ask for permissions.

For really huge blocks of material taken off the Forum we could split up the work between 'Catters that have the time and resources to do the research. I have a pretty good music library, and could devote some time to an important project like this; I'm sure there are other folks here who could do the same.

My main concern is that the financial burden of protecting Mudcat and the DT may be too heavy for Max and/or Dick and Susan to shoulder, if it comes down to neededing expensive copyright law attorneys (which may be what HFA is counting on - you don't need to establish a good legal case if your opponent can't afford to even go to court). If we can possibly keep negotiations with HFA/NMPA on a civil scale, we can perhaps lessen the need for pricey legal eagles...and splitting up the provenance establishment work among a bunch of volunteers will help, too!