Traditional folk music refers to customary songs and tunes played since time immemorial in a specific area. As an expression of culture and identity, this kind of music can be deemed as the heritage of the local community in its entirety and derives from musical practices transmitted orally and repeated over a long period of time by a group of people, who, in so doing, keep their traditions alive. From this point of view, the owner of traditional folk music is not a specific composer, but all the members of a local community. But this clashes with the efforts to copyright traditional folk music expressions, since often copyright acts do not recognize forms of collective ownership on folklore and traditional knowledge This paper aims to discuss possible solutions to tackle the issues related to the protection of traditional folk music, by considering not only the literature in the field of intellectual property, but also the outcomes of the legal formants and the comparative methodology, taking into consideration the studies of the social sciences involved in this topic, in particular anthropology and thnomusicology. The final task is to find a place for traditional folk music within the framework of copyright law and verify its level of protection.

EB00000003839K

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