Jim are you a writer?

If not it may have passed you by that we don't ask for or get royalties when we 'give' a song to someone.

Royalties slip in by the back door much later, when the PRS eventually pick up on our performances, and finally get round to sending the money to us.

Say Maccoll decided to 'pass' on the royalties to 'Champion at Keepin' 'Em Rolling.' The only way he could do this would be never to register the song with the PRS - and make sure his publisher never did do so either (remember, publishers get a small slice of the action too). And never to tell anyone he wrote it either, (because registration that can be done retrospectively, years later - up to 70 years after the writer's death in fact - I believe).

If he did in fact register Champion , then he'd get his due royalties in the usual way, from any performance via any licenced outlet.

He could tell anyone and everyone that they could use the song for free - and they could. Not a penny changes hands between writer and performer.

The money comes from the punters, as part of the door fee (they are paying to hear those songs) via the promoter, who buys the licence, or as part of the licence fee (in the case of the BBC) or whatever - there are many models.

If MacColl or his publisher had registered 'Champion' it would bring in a steady trickle of money until 70 years after his death. As I assume it does, as I assume he published it.

Now are you sure that there is a catagogue of works written by MacColl that are not listed in the PRS archives? If so, then the man was doing as you say, and waiving royalties because he wanted his songs to be out there.

But they'd have been just as 'out there' if he HAD registered them. Just as available for people to sing (you don't need permission to sing or record a song, it's just polite to ask, specially if you plan to make some changes).

As for Kennedy, I think you'll find that all he did was register arrangements of the songs that he'd arranged. That's all he could do by law anyway. The songs were clearly in public ownership, and you can't claim a trad song of itself, and I'm pretty sure Kennedy never tried to.

You might not like his arrangements, but he was within his rights to register them.

He was also within his rights to charge for copies of his field recordings - just as you would be if you chose to. They were his property, as yours are yours. The recordings, I mean - not the songs.

Now in an ideal world, all your source singers would have been signed up to the PRS (or its equivalent) and their arrangements (yes, just the way a solo voice sings an unaccompanied song constitutes and arrangement as you say) would have been registered when they were recorded.

But that's all THEY could claim. They were not the writers, and they didn't own the songs either.

We owe them thanks and respect for their role in the preservation of the songs, as we do to you and Peter and all the other collectors. But the only person who ever owned the song was the writer, or officially, the author and composer.

So, it follows that the only way to steal a song is to credit it as your composition when it's not. And people do do that.

But equally wrong, but even more annoying in my opinion, is when people are just lazy about accreditiation.

That's how we get someone telling an audience that Cloudstreet wrote Rue or Christy Moore wrote Raglan Road.

Suddenly the path is muddied, and that can lead to all kinds of problems that I've outlined elsewhere.

But these things are usually rectifiable if we are vigilent.

So we try to be.

Tom