Music copyright laws are in place to protect musicians and the original music owners. However, there are popular myths that churches have believed for years that have resulted in copyright infringement. Chris covers these myths, myths on video licensing, and what you should be doing.
Reference:
- Your Guide to Playing Church Music and COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!
- Video copyright Myths and Copyright Infringement
- Church Copyright Toolkit
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Erwin says
March 23, 2019 at 4:58 pmHi Chris, would livestreaming a service with music behind a password where only congregation members would be allowed to log in count as an extension of the service itself and therefore be legal, or does that still count as rebroadcasting? Or, streaming to another room in the same building, or, streaming to another building in another city?
Chris Huff says
March 25, 2019 at 11:36 amthat would still count as rebroadcast.
Richard Huss says
March 22, 2019 at 1:15 pmThanks for this! I’d just make a couple of further observations. Much of what you’ve said is generic, but in places, and especially when you’re talking about specific licences, there’s an implicit assumption that you’re talking to churches located in the USA. CCLI, for example, exists much more widely *but* the exact licences on offer, and their terms, can vary significantly between jurisdictions.
I don’t know if this applies more widely, but here in the UK we find our church is wanting to sing a significant number of songs that are in copyright but *not* covered by the CCLI licence. This seems to apply especially to songs whose authors are Roman Catholic (and we do sing those, though our church is Church of England). in the UK these tend to be covered instead by a Calamus licence, but I’ve no idea at all how this works out in, say, the USA.
James B says
March 21, 2019 at 10:18 amChristians ripping their favourite Christian music and videos and uploading to YouTube really bothers me.
But what about where Sony for example puts their music on YouTube for advertising purposes? Bill Gaither does this a lot. If we show those YouTube videos on the YouTube website during the offering for example the artist/publisher gets paid for another viewing. This to me seems like a grey area. We are essentially giving the artist/publisher free advertising.