I'm with you there, Jim. I cringe when I hear somebody stand up in a folk club and announce "this is a Kate Rusby/Martin Carthy/Steeleye Span/whatever song" and then sings something traditional.

Anne, who started this thread, writes her own songs, so does have some claim to ownership, and when a song is recorded, whether traditional or not, it's not the song itself but the mechanical copyright of that particular recording that needs to be respected.

My partner Mary Humphreys puts together arrangements and reconstructions of traditional songs and performs and records them. She is only too happy to encourage others to sing them, in that form (as some people do) or further modified and re-written (as Tom Bliss has done with one, for example). Getting the songs back into circulation is the primary motivation. For example we usually put a song (words, music and background text) into each issue of a local folk magazine, give out printed copies of our tune arrangements at workshops etc. That seems to me a reversal of your "privatisation" complaint.

But having said that, after we've recorded songs on an album on the Wild Goose label (run by Doug and Sue Bailey who are now very good friends, not a faceless "music industry" corporation) we wouldn't expect or encourage copies of those recordings to be distributed freely on the web. We do publish partial tracks (downloadable or on a demo CD) and we have some whole tracks on Myspace where downloading is difficult (though I acknowledge not impossible), but that's as far as I would want to go. We don't own the copyright on those recordings so we are pushing against the "fair use" boundary, but Doug knows what we are doing and we all assume it's worth doing for the promotional value.

I'd be interested to know if you have a problem with any of this.

Anahata