This might be old news to some, but in my research I found a fair amount of anecdotal “its ok” and some mis-information about the legalities of playing CD’s at a church service. I needed to figure it out and I wanted the hard facts – the law itself. This is what I’ve found out:
It is indeed legal to play the music from a CD as part of your service without violating the copyright. It doesn’t come from the fair use provision (US Copyright Law section 107 “Limitations on exclusive rights: fair use” ). This is a common misconception. It instead comes from section 110 “Limitations on exclusive rights: exemption of certain performances and displays” paragraph 3.
“(3) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly;”
So, it is fine to to play the CD as part of the service. Now, this doesn’t include projecting lyrics or printing guitar tabs or choir parts, etc.; that’s all under CCLI. This also doesn’t cover recording the audio as part of an audio or video recording – that’s a reproduction issue and paragraph 3 provides an exception for performance, not reproduction. Also, there probably is some question about if you want to play a CD as background at a church potluck. I suspect that since such a performance is not during the “course of services” that it would not be legal. But, that is outside of my initial search parameters for playing music during a church service proper.
Here are my key sources:
I hope this is helpful.
Tags: audio, ccli, church, copyright, exemption, fair use, music cd
March 16, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Glad you found your answer. I knew it wasn’t under Fair Use. Just wasn’t sure exactly where it fit. Good information to have.
March 17, 2009 at 5:24 am
yes – fair use didn’t “feel” quite right to me. Thanks for your comment and help the other day.
June 23, 2009 at 2:55 pm
[...] have correlated with some recent personal efforts and interests. I am pleased that my analysis of playing CD’s at a church service seems to be helping people (though I can only derive it from the hits, not the [...]