Following on from Waddon Pete's post above:

Interviewed in the Progressive in 2003, Utah Phillips said:

"Folk music isn't owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It's our common property. There is nobody's name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It's not copywritten.

"A song has many different versions as it is passed through the generations. But this deep well of our people's tradition loses songs at the bottom. They are irrelevant. They are forgotten. Nobody knows how to sing them. So the well is going to run dry unless people are adding songs at the top to our common treasury."

And interviewed on the Unlikely Stories website in 2005:

"Folk music (is)... part of the common consciousness. Folk music or a folk song can be the definition of a particular group of people, but it's still part of the collective consciousness. It's very seldom these days that a song enters the consciousness, loses its identity, the identity of the person that created it, and enters the consciousness anonymously. That's a laudable goal for anybody who makes songs. To have it embraced by the people and taken into their consciousness and used, changed, adapted, but where, eventually, nobody knows where it came from. I don't see many people trying to do that. I think that most of the music that's being created today is part of the properterian culture. That's why I really liked Napster. I really liked this assault on properterian culture, which turned all music loose and threw it up in the air and up for grabs. I liked that. That charmed the socks off of me."

Anarchists? Can't beat 'em!