In Digest 961206 Matthew Caulfield wrote:

> the first fact to remember is that any tune written before January 1,
> 1921, is currently and unequivocally in the public domain.

This is legally correct, but I'd like to note here that the Digital
Tradition Folk Song [a web site which offered music and lyrics] recently
closed its virtual doors because of lawsuits threatened against their
Internet Service Provider (ISP) for "copyright violations" of folk tunes
hundreds of years old.

It is not at all unusual for a company with a legal staff to claim
copyright on something and use such tactics to suppress legitimate public
domain works, and it's a very effective tactic, especially with timid
ISP's who have no stake in the matter one way or another.

They are trying to find another ISP with more of a spine, but their new
system wasn't up when I tried it.  The old url is still there, although
it no longer serves any lyrics.

  The old url was      http://web2.xerox.com/digitrad
  The new url will be  http://www.deltablues.com/dbsearch.html

Beware of people using such scurrilous tactics.  Under U.S. law, you are
responsible for _proving_ that a work _is_ in the public domain.  If you
are sued for such, then _you_ will be responsible for legal and lawyer
fees for the defense, and will not be reimbursed even if you win.

If you do win and want your thousands of dollars back, you need to sue
your sue-er, again putting your money up front, and prove in court that
they acted in bad faith and _knew_ the work was public domain to begin
with, a nearly impossible task.  This is one of the ways in which our
legal system is very severely broken.

Larry Smith