Thanks for your posting Jim - I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that "amateur" collecting could not be as ethically aware than university research. Or that un-ethical collecting (by today's standards) was at all widespread. But I think these recurring discussions about collecting, ethics and copyright throw up some interesting issues which don't ever seem to get mentioned.

For example, is there any situation where a song might be consciously NOT collected? To let singers retain it as exclusively theirs, rather than collect it and thereby have to face the problem of dealing with it as a kind of commidity in the various heritage games. Do we have to collect everything?