Woody Guthrie AMERICAN FOLK LEGEND

Woody Guthrie's recordings, virtually all made in the 1940s, are in the public domain in Europe, where copyright extends only 50 years. That means anyone who wants to can release a Guthrie album without licensing the material or paying royalties. Golden Stars' three-disc Guthrie box set American Folk Legend is a good example. Running an hour and 52 minutes and containing 42 tracks, the contents could have fit onto two CDs easily. The collection has no annotations beyond song titles and songwriting credits. It appears that all the unnamed compilers did was take some of the recent Guthrie collections made in the U.S. by Smithsonian Folkways and copy a bunch of the tracks. For example, "Farmer-Labor Train" was released for the first time on Smithsonian Folkways' Long Ways to Travel in 1994. It might sound as if taking another company's CD and copying it would constitute counterfeiting and therefore be illegal, but apparently that's not the case given the disparity in copyright law. (This