The composer Richard Strauss came back from Italy with what he thought was an Italian folk song, "Funiculì, Funiculà", and used it in the fourth movement of Aus Italien (From Italy), Op. 16, a tone poem or program symphony for orchestra. But it was not a folk song and not in the public domain. It is a Neapolitan song written in 1880 by Luigi Denza as commissioned work to celebrate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius:
Richard Strauss was an ardent proponent of copyright and involved in the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer, a precursor of the German GEMA. And in this case it was him who had to pay every time when his piece was played somewhere. Ah, the irony of the situation ...
