Thanks, Bearheart.

Just to reiterate, the Caedmon LPs are being reissued by Rounder in the Alan Lomax collection. Rounder owns the rights as far as I know. Three have appeared so far, the two Ballad releases and Songs of Seduction. One nice thing is that they provide full versions of some of the songs that were "snippeted" on the original LPs.

There are two prevailing opinions about the practice of releasing such snippets, by the way. Some think it's a good way to encourage comparison between versions (this is obviously why they did it in the first place). Others feel it's essentially a violation of the song and the singer's right to be fairly represented. What you all make of it is up to you!

Obviously, copying the entire albums is an infringement of copyright, just as going to the library and photocopying a whole book is. (In fact, Kinko's was sued over this and consequently is very strict about how much of a book they will include in course packs.) If you are using the recording for scholarly purposes, it is permissable to copy some of the album--I don't have an actual figure or percentage, though. If you are really doing something scholarly with a tape (like publishing a paper or a book in which you cite the album, or using them as examples in a classroom)then few companies would pursue you for copyright violation. If you just say that it's scholarly because you have a serious interest, but you don't actually produce scholarly work, that may be a different question.

Ethically, this is a different question than legally. Particulary with the volumes that have not yet been reissued, I doubt if anyone would blame you for copying the old LPs. It's not like the singers ever got any royalties anyway!