Dylan quickly picked up on Dave Van Ronk's excellent version of "House of the Rising Sun" after seeing Van Ronk play it live a couple of times. I'd have done the same thing, because Van Ronk's version was wonderful! Anybody'd have imitated it. Previous versions of the song, which is a trad song as far as I know, were not nearly as interesting as Van Ronk's new arrangement which Dylan learned and then used on his first album. Van Ronk was planning to record the song shortly himself, but Dylan beat him to it! I don't think there's any law against learning a new arrangement of a trad song by observing someone else play it...we all do things like that...but Van Ronk was understandably miffed over Dylan scooping him on getting that arrangement of the song recorded first. I doubt that Dylan really thought about it or focused on that...he'd just learned the version of the song that he liked the best and he decided to include it with other covers of old songs (mostly old blues songs) on his first album, because it fit in well at the time.

Van Ronk has long since forgiven Bob for that, and speaks very well of him on Scorcese's film biography of Dylan. As for Dylan, he's been very praising and generous toward Van Ronk and most of the other folk veterans of that early Greenwich Village period in his book "Chronicles". If certain people on this forum were as gracious as both Dylan and Van Ronk have been toward the people they shared that early Greenwich Village period with, we'd hear a lot less bitching, accusation, and self-righteous fault-finding on these music threads, wouldn't we?

And wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air...