Copyright Question

[brainier]

This is not really the place for this but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on what to do with this...

We have started to record the songs we sing at church in the CCLI reporting software (CopyReport 2) and the other day went to check the Projector column for Vernon Higham's "Great Is The Gospel Of Our Glorious God" only to find that CCLI do not licence us to use it.

So, how do I get a licence to use this excellent hymn (and others in the same state). It means currently that we have to revert back to books to sing this song, and I was considering updating my Zionworx's database to remove the words for the songs that fall into this category and just project text along the lines of "For reasons of copyright please sing this song from book_name, number XXX."

So before I go an delete songs from the database - what do others do?

[danparkes]

My suggestion would be to try to get in touch with the person that wrote it. If the song is in a book then the addesses of the copyright holders may be printed at the back (they are for Songs of Fellowship and The Source).

We went down this route when we wanted to publicly show a film called "Timechanger." As this was produced independently by a Christian film company in the States it was not covered by the standard video copyright agreements. We wrote directly to the director who made the film and runs the company and asked for his permission. We now have a letter allowing us to show the film for the public as well as clips during services. As long as we have this I understand that we are covered for this film.

I hope this helps.