Tune Copyright Register

Last updated: 19 August 2026

Most Irish traditional tunes are old and belong to everyone. Some are not. Thousands of tunes played in sessions today were written by named composers, many of them living. Before Sessionist treats a tune as free to use, we try to establish which kind it is — and we publish that working out here so you can check it, and tell us when we have it wrong.

This page covers 22,617 tunes. We have examined 500 of them so far, starting with the most played; of those, 281 turned up evidence solid enough to cite, and the rest came back with nothing conclusive. Everything we have not reached yet is listed honestly as not researched.

This is our good-faith research, not legal advice, and not a legal determination. It records what we believe and why.

1. Tell us we are wrong

This register exists to be corrected. If you know something we do not — you wrote the tune, you know who did, you know the book it first appeared in, or you think we have simply confused two tunes with the same name — please tell us and we will change it.

Email copyright@sessionist.ie with the tune name and its number from the table below, and whatever you can tell us. A source is helpful but not required; if you are the composer, just say so.

If you hold rights in a tune we have not listed as in copyright, tell us and we will act the same day — see section 6 for exactly what happens next. Sessionist stops serving player-contributed recordings of that tune immediately, before anything is decided, so you are protected from the moment you contact us.

2. What the categories mean

Category	What we believe
TRAD-PRINT	The tune appears in a printed book or manuscript old enough that no one holds rights in it — for example Ryan's Mammoth Collection (1883) or the Goodman manuscripts (c.1860s).
PD-COMP	A named composer wrote it, but long enough ago that copyright has expired — O'Carolan, Niel Gow, Scott Skinner.
TRAD-ORAL	Nobody claims to have written it and it is played as a traditional tune, but we have not found it in an old printed source. Probably traditional; not proven.
MOD-COMP	In copyright. A named composer wrote it and they are living, or died recently enough that copyright still runs.
MOD-CLAIM	Someone is credited with writing it, but we have not been able to confirm it. Treated as possibly in copyright.
DISPUTED	Sources disagree. Treated as in copyright until it is settled.
UNKNOWN	We have not researched this one yet and have no view either way.

3. How sure we are

Every entry carries a confidence figure from 0 to 4.

4 — we have looked at the original printed page and checked the actual notes.
3 — two or more independent reputable sources agree.
2 — one reputable source.
1 — a weak signal only, such as a credit typed into a tune database by a user.
0 — nothing.

We only treat a tune as free to use at confidence 3 or better. Nothing in this register is currently rated 4, and we would rather say so than imply more certainty than we have — see the limitation in section 5.

4. Where our evidence comes from

The Irish Traditional Music Archive — Ireland's national archive of traditional music. Its digitised score catalogue lets us check whether a tune appears in a collection old enough to be out of copyright. Where we cite ITMA, the link in the table goes straight to the archive record so you can look at it yourself.
theSession.org — tune identity, alternative names, and the composer credits its members have entered. Those credits are a starting point for research, never a conclusion.
Published sources on composers — reference works, obituaries, archives and musicians' own pages, cited per entry where we used them.

The tune data itself comes from theSession under the Open Database Licence; how we use it is described on our open data page.

5. The main limitation, stated plainly

We have matched tunes by name, not by melody. Tune names move around in the tradition: the same name gets attached to different tunes, and one tune travels under many names. So when we say a tune appears in an 1883 collection, we mean a tune of that name appears there. That is good evidence, but it is not proof that it is the same melody.

This is why nothing here is rated confidence 4, and why some entries are marked as needing a closer look. Where a name match came through an alternative title rather than the tune's own name, we flag it rather than quietly counting it.

6. If you hold rights in a tune we have not listed

Tell us at copyright@sessionist.ie and we act the same day. Then we do something more than simply delete it, and it is worth being open about why.

A tune quietly withdrawn on a single unexamined assertion is a small loss to everyone who plays this music, and nothing is learned from it. So a claim does not close the question — it opens it, in public.

The claim comes from the rights holder, with something to show. Not a third party and not hearsay: the holder, asserting ownership, with whatever evidence exists — when the tune was composed, where it was first published or recorded, a collecting-society registration, or a credible account of how it came about.
We act immediately — that tune reverts to MIDI. Player-contributed recordings of it stop being served and no further contributions are accepted. This happens on receipt, before any investigation, so you are protected from the moment you contact us.
We publish the claim against that tune in this register, and seek to confirm it with the traditional-music community and with public bodies such as state-funded archives.
We ask openly whether anyone else could claim the same tune — an older printed source, a different composer, or evidence that it is traditional. Publishing a claim is also an invitation to contradict it.
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. If we do find that earlier evidence, the tune returns to the pool with a far better record than it had before. If it is simply unsettled, it stays down, because an unresolved claim is not a reason to put a tune back.
The question stays open, in one direction only. We set no deadline. A tune only leaves the common pool on positive evidence, but 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. A settled claim is a conclusion on the evidence we have, not a claim about what can never be found.

This asks more of a claimant than a form does, and that is deliberate. It means a claim is acted on at once and taken seriously, and it means the answer — whichever way it goes — is written down and shared instead of lost. Every claim adds to the public record for that tune, and we publish all of it for anyone to use for research. A takedown request becomes a contribution to what is known about this music rather than a deletion from it.

If a recording you contributed is withdrawn under this process, you have done nothing wrong — the tune was open when you played it. We will tell you, it counts against you in no way, and if the claim is later contradicted the tune reopens.

7. What this changes in the app

Where we believe a tune is in copyright, Sessionist does not invite players to contribute recordings of it for other users to learn from. 97 tunes are currently held back for that reason. Composers are credited by name in the app wherever we know who they are.

8. The register

Search by tune name or number. Every tune links to its page on theSession, and to our sources where we have them.

Tune	Category	Conf.	Why we think so	Sources

The complete register is also available as a data file: tune-copyright-register.json.

9. Concerns

Anything at all about how Sessionist uses a tune — copyright@sessionist.ie.