Can I slightly widen this, please? I am no expert on copyright law. Over the years I collected (on tape) quite a number of songs and folktales. Many of these recordings were issued on LPs and CDs. Over the years I have noticed that many of these recordings have appeared on places such as YouTube. Should I have been asked for permission to do so? Like I say, I just don’t know what the law has to say about this. One set of recordings of unaccompanied traditional singers appeared with added instrumental accompaniment. Some readers may remember that the collector Peter Kennedy had done the same thing to some of his recordings. These were then issued for sale by him. There was, rightly I think, quite an outcry about this and he withdrew the cassettes that he was trying to sell. I contacted the person who had added his music to ‘my’ recordings and was accused on-line of being a member of ‘the folk Taliban’, or some such nonsense.
I have never collected songs in order to make money for myself ( even though at times it has cost me quite a bit of my own money) but have always tried to pass on any royalties to the singers involved. If some unknown person reissues ‘my’ recordings then they are surely denying the artists (or the artists family) payments that should be made to them. So, I suppose what I am trying to ask is, do these anonymous people who ‘post’ these recordings on line have the ‘right’ (legally or morally) to do so?