There is music that went into the public domain and was then removed from the public domain by a change in the copyright laws. The beneficiaries, as pointed out above, are the publishing companies, not the authors, most of whom are long dead.

The thing that angers me is the idea that the publishers believe that they have an absolute right to profit--whether they sell anything or not. I pay royalties to publishers on my own material when I burn it to CD, because there is a built in royalty in the price of blank music CD's --They recently came   up with a plan to charge college students a monthly royalty feeas part of their tuition to compensate for any music they might download. Whenever sales are down(which always happens when the economy is bad) they claim that someone is stealing from them, and demand a fee be attached to something, somewhere.

They claimed that they were being robbed back in the eighties when radio stations started playing whole albums. The claimed that they were being robbed by restaurants who played recorded music without paying performance fees, and one of these days, they are going to try to put a royalty fee on musical instruments because playing your own music cuts into their CD sales.