They play the Hokey Pokey at baseball games, if it is the same song of which I am thinking -- put your left foot in, and all that?

I do not find this discussion rude, and am surprised anyone should. If you think this is rude, you want to spend a day at my job.:) This discussion is quite informative. You cannot make provocative statements, sometimes tinged with your own political slant, and expect others not to rise to the challenge. But to be sure the discussion seems reasonable.

Do the copyright people seriously go around annoying Girl Scouts about singalongs? (I don't think Girl Scouts exist any more, BTW, and up here the boys and girls are now just Scouts together.) If so this would be a golden opportunity to write a scathing satirical song or skit.

I don't know why you would blame the lawyers, who are the hired guns. If you are on the other side of the fence you can get them too, and not necessarily for the big money you think. (And in Canada, at least, if you win the losers have to pay your legal costs.) The problem is the law that makes it worthwhile for the hard men to hire the lawyers to annoy the Girl Scouts and the pub owners.

A friend of mine once got into trouble with the copyright Nazis when he sold tee-shirts suggesting that a particular Canadian singer/songwriter should be elected Prime Minister. Far from taking this as a compliment, the man in question had the lawyers on him for infringing his stage name, which he alleged was copyrighted. I told my friend to go to the media and raise a stink to embarass the guy, it being a slow news week, but he decided he'd just stop selling the tee-shirts. Given that the context was political commentary, and that the man has been known these thirty or more years only by this stage name, I doubt if the persecutors had a leg to stand on. But my friend didn't want the hassle.