House of Worship Music Copyright Concern

[redrazor23]

I am the sound engineer as well as multimedia liasion for a local church, who has put together a fine group of musicians. We are currently distributing the sermons as they are original content, and we have a CCLI license to perform music with no issues in the church, and CCLI even states we can make CDs or DVDs as long we dont charge more than $12 for the media product. However, we have been asked by staff member as well as church members and other internet goers, why no music. We are extremely concerned that this would violate CCLI agreement, although we cant find anywhere on their website about internet song availability. As this is a House of Worship, there is no intent to collect monitary reimbursement for the performances... Thanks in advance for any information anyone has on this! To make things worse our pastor recently found out about ustream.tv and wants to start broadcasting live... and again, the concern of the music is on our minds heavily!

 

[presutin]

Maybe you should talk to a copyright attorney to see what you can do to protect your product and how the church can negotiate with you the rights to your music during the live streaming. Hope this helps!

 

[Michael Wechsler]

I remember seeing something about the CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) somewhere else here. Why not call them up and discuss it with them? What did they tell you? What are you trying to record and distribute?

 

[redrazor23]

We are wanting to A: record the worship songs and allow them to be shared on the internet as part of the entire service, if one wished to listen (mp3 files). B: record and "televise" the service as a live feed via the website ustream.tv. Again, the performance of the live worship would be recorded and available to anyone who wanted to watch and listen from the internet. We are attempting to do this as there are several small communities around who are attempting to start new churches and have no worship team. This would give us the opportunity to feed those churches a live performance, but again we run into that copyright issue as ANYONE can view from ustream (and we want anyone to be able to watch as well)... Thanks again!!

 

[Michael Wechsler]

As I mentioned, if there may be a licensing issue, why not discuss it with the licensors? I'm sure this isn't something completely new to them.