Thursday, December 14, 2006

Copyright or Copywrong?

I understand the need for a copyright law, but it's one of those things that is imperfect at best. I spent several years trying to figure it out working with the Acappella Company. Now I find myself back into it again.

As you probably read in an earlier post, I would like to be able to post a capella recordings of new songs (new to our church, not newly written... yet) on our website. Our first song was Everlasting God by Brenton Brown. We introduced it to the church last night and it went well.

Anyway, I went through the whole process of requesting a license so that we could get it online. Long story short (and it is very long), I was denied a license. I can record it for release on an album, but it cannot be placed on the Internet. This is not so much a function of copyright law as it is EMI/Word policy.

On the company FAQ they say, "songs or master recordings that are owned or administered by EMI Christian Music Group and Word Music, LLC cannot be used on the Internet in any form. Vineyard Music Group recordings are licensed by EMI Christian Music Group; therefore, they cannot be used on the Internet, " and "The right to display a copyrighted work is an exclusive right of the copyright holder. Also, the right to offer printed copies of someones copyrighted work requires a print license. Subsequently, to be able to display or to offer printed versions (chord charts, lead sheets etc-all of which will need to be secured and or password protected via e-commerce) of our songs via your website, will necessitate a print license from us. As previously stated, EMI and Word do not allow any of their songs on the internet in any form, so we will not be able to license any of the EMI and Word songs for use on the Internet."

So I wrote them back, just to be sure. I wanted to make sure that they understood we were making a new recording, not asking to use the original recording, and that we were wanting to pay royalties. And if this was still not allowed, how did iTunes and other such services fit into that policy?

They replied that large corporate music services were given special allowances (read: we make more money) and at this time EMI is not currently allowing downloads from individual (custom) sites.

However, if we wished to make our recording available on iTunes I should let them know and we can proceed from there. And that, of course, would kill the entire reason for doing this in the first place. How do you teach your church a new song if they have to go to iTunes to buy it first?

So, as far as songs owned and administered by EMI are concerned (which is a lot), we are reduced to physical CD releases. That's not so bad, just time consuming and costly. We'll see what happens.

So my next question... how does MySpace get away with allowing all those songs streamed from their thousands of pages? Surely some of those belong to EMI. And I'm sure that if EMI has that policy, you can bet other labels do as well.

Maybe Word would make an exception for one of their former distributed artists? Nah... I'm not holding my breath.

2 comments:

John Owens said...

Mo, this is interesting and frustrating. What if you just put a streaming audio file on the site? What copyright headaches would you have then? You could have those streaming files up for the month that your song is featured.

Also, "Everlasting God" is one of my new favs. Have you heard Tomlin do it? Do you have a score for it? Could I get it, or would we both go to jail?

I've got a few arrangements if you want to lower your standards. :) You may get a good laugh out of them, but if you're interested, let me know. (songs by Tim Hughes, unrecorded Watermark, and a local guy here in ATL at North Point Community Church)

Gary Moyers said...

Streaming counts as well. They specify NO web usage at all. Interesting thing about it is, I would doubt seriously if they ever knew. But then again, as crazy as the industry is, they may have their own version of the web-police who scour the net looking for violations. Lord save us from the RIAA.

I'll send you my arrangement of Everlasting God.