Protecting traditional songs

The Folk Den is a repository of Roger McGuinn’s performances of traditional songs in the United States. From the website:

‘The purpose of this page is to use the medium of the World Wide Web to continue the tradition of the folk process, that is the telling of stories, and singing of songs, passed on from one generation to another by word of mouth.

In this electronic era, such a process is in danger of being overwhelmed by the commercial mass media. This page and others on the ‘net are working to preserve the folk songs that have chronicled our global heritage for centuries.

In the Folk Den there will be a “new” folk song uploaded every month as a “Global Community Service.”

He says this about his decision to use the Creative Commons Music Sharing License:

‘I’d been putting these folk songs up on iBiblio for some time without any thought to protect them, although I’d put a little copyright line — McGuinn Music — at the bottom. But I didn’t really know if that protected them or not. My main attraction to Creative Commons was the fact that it provides a level of sharing, which is exactly what I want to do with the songs in the Folk Den. My whole purpose for putting them up there is to keep them going. It occurred to me back in 1995 when I started the Folk Den that the traditional side of folk music was getting neglected because of the singer-songwriter phenomenon. New singer-songwriters are not doing traditional music anymore.

This is one of the greatest examples that I’ve seen of someone using Creative Commons to distribute traditional knowledge – it protects, it preserves and it distributes far and wide.