If people would behave in a respectful manner & not abuse good manners, perhaps we would not have the rampant stealing of the music of good, honest composers & arrangers. The fact remains that there are people who will abuse and cheat & steal music no matter what. I was at a regular ongoing session where several folks kept asking if anyone had the music to 3 or 4 popular tunes in the key in which we were playing them. I was kind enough to go home & write out the tunes with the proper chords, and a couple of versions of melodies I had learned, which everyone said they had never heard before (as I learned it from some buddies from Ireland), & gave them to a handful of folks at the session, with my name signed at the bottom as the person who wrote them down. Not too many weeks later, there was a guy there at the session who was selling notebooks of session tunes which he said he had compiled from the internet & made copies of. Some of the folks were looking through the tunes, and lo & behold, there were the tunes & had handed out at the session in this guy's book. There were other tunes in there that others had brought to the session, which some of those regular players recognized--some of which were written by those at the session. I informed him that I recognized some of the tunes in there as the ones I had given out at the session. He quickly grabbed the notebooks & left. I saw him later told him my point is that he should have asked me (& the others) if it was ok to include what was obviously mine in his book. If I had copyrighted the arrangements, this guy would not have cared, as he had also taken copyrighted tunes right out of popularly known collections & put them in his book. Now I will grant that the handful of notebooks he will eventually sell will probably not amount to much, but he did something which was wrong, and then tried to say that it was his right to do so because this is a "free country." There are people who steal from banks & convenience stores because they believe that they have the right to do whatever they can get away with. When we condone stealing in any form, we are condoning wrongdoing. Our children see us doing this & then we wonder where they learned to lie & cheat & steal & do things which we believe they could never have learned from us. We cannot have good stealing & bad stealing, or good lies & bad lies. Somewhere along the way we have to take a stand, and copyright laws are there because there are people whose livelihoods depend upon the money from the sale of their music. And yes, there are some people who have plenty of money & we wonder how it can be that they need any more money, but nonetheless, the laws are there to protect their rights. It irks me that a song as good as "God Bless America" is not in the public domain, as I would love to be able to freely perform it whenever & wherever. I can only imagine that the greatest compliment a composer could ever have is that his or her music is beloved & sung freely by every man woman & child in their country, but copyright laws protect Irving Berlin's songs, too because the law is no respector of persons & will protect the copyrights of the rich & the poor. Therefore I suppose that the moral of the story is to copyright everything one can, before someone else does! And, perhaps, that we should remember what we were taught in kindergarten, which is to respect the toys of the other children.