While "A Publisher" has said some very reasonable things, which we would do well to take seriously, it is nevertheless possible that he may be assuming that claimed copyright amounts to sustainable title in law. With particular reference to traditional music, I daresay that a lot of people here are familiar with Paul Simon's documented claim to have written "Scarborough Fair", a song which pre-dates his birth by a couple of hundred years, and to which he has no more right than do I to, for example, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". Bob Dylan and many others are equally guilty of attempting to annexe traditional material for purposes of profit. That, I think, is a particularly strong reason why claims made against the DT need to be properly substantiated by whoever is making them; as AP makes clear, the initial letter was simply a mass trawling exercise. It is, of course, unfortunate that that letter was couched in threatening language and clearly intended to intimidate. On the face of it, that is scarcely an appropriate basis on which to begin to establish any kind of working relationship; though it is also worth bearing in mind that, as several people have pointed out, at least one "lyric site" attacked by these people has now re-appeared as an owned subsidiary. One may reasonably suspect that empire-building is perhaps as important a motive in this case as is "doing the right thing". After all, nobody so far has provided any evidence that they have any legal right to represent any supposed (and, so far un-named) copyright holders whose intellectual rights may or may not have been infringed by the DT. While it is perfectly true that the database contains some songs which are not properly credited to their authors (either because the people who have provided the material have made unjustified assumptions about their provenance, or because the performers from whom they obtained that material have failed to check their sources) it is equally true that some songs which are demonstrably in Public Domain have in the same way been credited to people who have simply claimed rights to them without any historical or moral justification.

Having said all that, I must say that I do not believe for a moment that the publishing of song lyrics on a non-profit-making basis on the Internet can in any way compromise the potential income of the originators of those lyrics: it is far more likely to increase their income; provided, of course, that the owners of any recordings or sheetmusic concerned are prepared to ensure that they are in print and available for sale. It may, of course, feel threatening to the owners of the copyright in those lyrics where they are commercial publishers rather than the actual writers concerned. Many of us, I suspect, know people who have found "their" intellectual property being defended very assiduously by people they have never heard of, and whose devotion to duty does not seem to involve actually publishing anything, or passing on any of the royalties that they purport to collect.

Malcolm