It is ridiculously disingenuous to wring your hands as if the artists who "signed away their rights," or however it happened, were canny, grasping, devious individuals who knew what they were doing and were somehow taking a high-level calculated risk with their intellectual property in order to make a quick buck or something. Your average soul in the folk music world is just not like that. Ordinary chaps and chapesses they were, and are, who on the whole don't do legal stuff not least because it's perceived to cost an arm and a leg, so they, foolishly maybe and I'm the first to admit it, let someone else do the unwise deals. In other words, rip them off. Somebody please tell me where the morality is in a situation in which some bloke who does nothing but sit on recordings (not manuscripts or arrangements or tune-books but RECORDINGS, in which the artists did ALL the work, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the umpteen hundred takes, played and sang every note and probably impoverished themselves in the process by doing it instead of a day job, and much to the delight of all of us) and refuses to let the artists make a single penny out of their work for decades. Ron, old chap, I'll tell you how "complicated" an issue it is. It's a conflict between legal-technical and fairness-humanity. Who's side are you on, Ron? "Complications" are assuredly in the eye of the biased beholder.

Hands up all who want to hear "Ten Thousand Miles" in glorious CD-not-R quality in the knowledge that that wonderful piece of artistry will at last make a few quid for Nic Jones. Is your hand up, Ron, or are you contemplating all those complications?