Tune copyright

Tune copyright — how we handle it

theSession's Open Database Licence covers the database of tunes. It does not — and could not — say anything about copyright in the tunes themselves. Most Irish traditional tunes are old and belong to everyone. Some are not: plenty of tunes played in sessions today were written by named composers, many of them still living.

So we start from off. A player can only contribute a recording of a tune when we have confirmed that the tune is out of copyright. Every other tune — the overwhelming majority — cannot be recorded, not because we believe it is in copyright, but because we have not established that it is not.

What that does not affect, which is nearly everything:

• Every tune can still be played and learned in the app.
• Every tune can still be scored in practice.
• Every tune still counts on leaderboards.

The only thing withheld is player-contributed audio recordings of a tune being shared with other learners.

A name attached to a tune is not the same as a claim of ownership. In this music a credit very often means this person made the tune well known, or this setting comes from their playing — not this person owns it. A tune can be two hundred years old and still be "Paddy So-and-so's" to everyone who plays it. We treat a credit as a starting point for research, never as a conclusion.

Tunes cleared for recording

These are tunes whose out-of-copyright status we have confirmed, with the source that establishes it.

The standard a tune has to meet

Our catalogue holds 22,617 tunes. To be cleared for recording, a tune must meet all of the following:

1. A positive finding that it is out of copyright — that it appears in a printed source old enough to be public domain, or that its composer's copyright has expired. An absence of evidence never clears a tune.
2. The melody verified against a source we have actually seen, cited with its collection, year and page. Not merely a tune of the same name in an old book — titles move around freely in this music, and two unrelated tunes can share one.
3. No composer credited anywhere, in any source we consulted.
4. No outstanding rights claim.

Point 2 is the demanding one, and it is deliberate. We would rather withhold a tune that turns out to be perfectly free than record one that is not.

If you hold rights in a tune

Because recording is off by default, there should be very little to complain about — but if you believe we have something wrong, or you hold rights in a tune and want it left alone entirely, write to copyright@sessionist.ie.

Tell us which tunes — by name, and by their page on theSession if you can. A claim over "our catalogue" or "our members' works" in general cannot be acted on, because everything we do runs tune by tune. Name them and we can act; we cannot act on a list we do not have.

1. The claim comes from the rights holder, with something to show. Not a third party, not "someone told me".
2. We act immediately — that tune reverts to MIDI and stops being recordable, before anything is decided.
3. We publish the claim against that tune here, and seek to confirm it with the traditional-music community and public archives.
4. We ask openly whether anyone else could claim the same tune — an older printed source, another composer.
5. Then we take a position and record it. If you have shown ownership and we have not been able to point to earlier evidence that the tune already existed, it stays down — and you will not be asked to make the case again.
6. The question stays open, in one direction only. We set no deadline. If better evidence turns up later — an older printed source, a manuscript, a recording that predates the claim — we will say so publicly and our position moves back towards freeing the tune.

See also the open data page, which covers the licence our tune catalogue carries.