Bluegrass is a highly technical, musically complex, urban form of Appalachian country music. It is distinct for sharing the rhythm among stringed instruments (stemming from the constraint that the trip down from the mountains into the cities - usually conducted by freight trains and pickup trucks - did not afford the transport of a drum kit).

At its core is a corpus of traditional songs which have been handed down across generations, especially Irish fiddle tunes and West African banjo music.

The concepts of digital freedom trace multiple clear lineages to this tradition of music. For example, John Perry Barlow, who founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Freedom of The Press Foundation, and participated heavily in discussions on The WELL which laid the cryptological groundwork that eventually became blockchains, was a member of The Grateful Dead (who, while more of a rock or country band than a traditional string band, stewarded and celebrated this corpus of music across several decades) and was himself an aficionado of the history of IP-unencumbered music.

If you see the word "Traditional" on a bluegrass setlist (usually listed next to a song where an author normally goes), it effectively means "I assert that this song is not subject to intellectual property."