I agree that the website is a complete disaster - and I've told them that too!

Essentially an arranger IS a writer as far as PRS is concerned.

When you make an arrangement of a PD work you are creating copyright on that arrangement, and only on that arrangement.

Effectively you can only easily prove your own performances are exactly of that arrangement (though Carthy might have had a strong case against Simon, for example), so you claim 100% of the royalty on your own performances of that PD work - because the percentage which would have gone to the writer is up for grabs.

People in the past have gone so far as to credit PD works to themselves under this principle (which, legally, they may) and some folksters therefore think this means they have acquired (stolen) ownership of the copyright of the work itself (which they have, in fact, not done) and got all cross and sulky about it.

But in law a PD work remains PD in perpetuity, so anyone else can make their own arrangement, and claim 100% on their own performances of that arrangement. And lots of folk people do this. It's a good thing, because it keeps the works in currency and gets PRS licence money back to the folk world, without doing any damage at all - though obviously the work should always be attributed as Trad (arr Jones/Bliss), so everyone else can have a go.

I've had the devil of a job persuading a chum that Van Dieman's Land is trad, because he learned it from a CD which implies on the back that it was written by some chap called Wilson, or Waterbottom or Weeebil or MacDonalds or some such - and he's convinced this means it's a new copyright work.

Sigh.

Tom