Wrong on several counts, but why am I not surprised?

You lack the vision, Richard - much less the generosity of spirit - that would enable you to see just how bogus the 1954 Definition really is. It goes something like this...

(i) continuity which links the present with the past;

To our Drunken Japanese Tourist My Way is an icon of such an historical continuity. It is a sacred & solemn testimony of the functionalist dream of capitalist individualism his country seized upon as eagerly as the media of its post-war renaissance. He sees no irony in this, eagerly grabbing the microphone he gives golden-voice praise to the very heavens...

(ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group;

As well as the backing track, he sings to an idealised definitive version embedded in his brain; this ideal is what he aspires to with all his heart and soul unaware of any shortfall which is not, naturally, inconsiderable. This is the measure of his creative impulse, as he, in effect, reinvents the song from the inside out.

(iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.

The community roar their unreserved approval; they have determined the form in which this music survives; for, however so debased it might appear to the outsider, they are the triumphant masters of their vernacular art.

(The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music

As an aside I can say that no such community exists or has ever existed, certainly not in the West.)

and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.

Unwritten? Well leaving that particular myth aside as plainly idiotic, we can see how My Way has been absorbed into the living tradition of our Karaoke Community, who demand and insist upon hearing not only that which they know, BUT would rather listen to in an impassioned living vernacular variation of same than a recording by an established artiste.

The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged

God knows that the song remains unchanged; in the case of the Karaoke Community, the song-meme exists as a conceptual fragment that manifests itself in a million different variations each night around the Karaoke bars of planet earth.

Now, imagine in a keen folklorist / ethnomusicologist was on hand to record all these variations...

for it is the re-fashioning and re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character.

And there, in a nutshell, is the very essence of Karaoke Music: that these songs are re-fashioned and re-created nightly in a ceremonial celebration of the very essence of folk character. Cultural entropy is counterbalanced by a more occult level of inner-creativity that exists by means of the technological innovations that have necessitated a surfeit of nostalgia which, as a species, we're prone to anyway (how folk singers does it take o change a light bulb?). Thus does our Drunken Japanese Tourist experience My Way in precisely the same way Harry Cox experienced The Crabfish, and Richard Bridge experiences The Famous Flower of Serving Men.

The only difference, I'd have to say, is one of taste.