That can happen. As a musician myself I ripped off unknowingly riffs from at least 3 songs (thankfully one was caught before recording) including one from a band I don’t even like, so yeah. But this theme seems just like an intentional take on a popular period song, which is fine. In the first “Pirates!” game I think all music was lifted from classical composers.
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Thankfully it’s old enough that modern copyright laws don’t touch it - public domain!
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Awesome pirating
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I think Michael Land is probably disappointed in our collective lack of musical knowledge that it took us this long to notice what was, for him, probably a really obvious and appropriate reference 
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And now, three years after this thread was opened and about 30 years after I first played Monkey Island, I realize there were a lot of wonderful music in the game that I missed, because I always used the PC speaker music (the first time out of necessity, the others out of nostalgia).
Thanks, my fellow fan (and countrymate) for making me discover this tune!
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