>All I can think of is that I'd be honored that somebody valued it that much.

This is true but put yourself in the shoes of an artist, say John Denver. He would have been (oops) "delighted" if you liked his song enough to record it and send copies to all your friends. He'd have been even be more happy if you bought each of them a CD, so that he got paid for his work.

We're hardly on the scale of an MP3 download site here but I do worry when we/I refer to sites which have clearly posted material which should be copyright onto their site. I suspect that the big lyrics site we looked at recently is above board but that someone who has posted the entire lyrics of a recent pop song onto their home page probably isn't. In which case short exerpts to illustrate a point are probably "fair dealing" but full versions are not. In the case of the traditional song lyrics that have been discussed, they are likely to be in the public domain, so are OK. Similarly Shakespeare, Keats etc are out of copyright but whilst Beowolf is out of copyright, a recent translation is not.