Our local folk music session recently had an email list discussion about this rumored DropBox folder containing sheet music for everything. Somebody replied saying, essentially, this isn’t their folder and it’s doubtful the copyright terms allow us to give it away anyhow. Here’s what I wrote back, then removed because it was too long:
I’m going to guess whatever’s in this DropBox folder probably has multiple authors, and that the vast majority don’t list any copyright information at all, much less distribution terms. Unfortunately, that means we can’t make copies. Even having them in the DropBox is probably not legal.
Sifting through the documents looking for things that clearly show who holds the copyright, and indicating that the copyright holder grants distribution permissions, would be a big job. I have a hunch it would only yield a few documents: probably less than a dozen.
If we wanted our own Folk Music Fake Book, we would probably have to start over, accurately notating every tune we play, and building sets out of those tunes: essentially, recreating thesession.org from scratch. We’d need some sort of contributor agreement, either a shrink-wrap license or a signed document, agreeing to place all contributions into some variant of a creative commons license. Just getting 12 people to agree on distribution terms for creative work is a pretty big effort, to say nothing of actually notating all the tunes. It could take years.
Another option would be me bringing my little tape recorder in, and trying to cajole some sort of AI engine to transcribe tunes from the recording. This would have to be proofread and edited, but it might only take a year of weekends before a finished product was ready.
My hot take: it’s not worth it. Lots of this music is so old, it predates the Gutenberg press and any notion of copyright. It gets passed along aurally, and all the quirky variations are a result of people remembering things just a bit differently. That’s a very human tradition and what makes folk music special.