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We should blame Congress too, especially with the passage of the "Sonny Bono", that extend copyrights to 70 years after the death of the composer.




Don't suppose that just because a copyright term has expired and a work has entered the public domain that someone hasn't subsequently found a way to claim it. I once had the bright idea of recording a bunch of public domain folk songs until I did some research on the subject and read about the legal woes of the Kingston Trio over their hit with "Tom Dooley".

As you probably know, the song Tom Dooley is an old Appalachian Mountain folk tune that had been handed down in various forms from generation to generation and no one could really claim authorship. The Kinsgton Trio specialized in modernizing some of these old songs and credited Tom Dooley as a traditional song arranged by Dave Guard on their record. The KT was sued by a gentleman named Frank Warner who went around and collected old folks songs by listening to the people in the mountains that performed them. His publishers, John and Alan Lomax, also claimed the publishing rights. Although the Trio claimed that they had learned the song just by listening to other performers (and there is no doubt that their arrangement was quite original) they were unable to prove in court that their knowledge of the song did not trace back directly or indirectly to the published work of Frank Warner. They ultimately lost the lawsuit and were forced to pay both real and punitive damages to the copyright holder. One wonders, that if a copyright is created at the moment a work is created, why the performer that Warner took the song from couldn't sue him and the Lomax brothers for violating his copyright. Oh, well.

Keith
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