Order of the Bath

When we started the investigation to change over from using hymn books to projecting words of songs onto a screen, the administrative position looked straight forward. We had a CCL licence and we would note which songs were used for the annual report. We were already doing it for intermittent photocopies and the projection software may even help by recording the activity for us.

Whilst loading whatever songs I could lay my hands on in electronic format I spotted a hitch. Songs of Fellowship helpfully provides a disc containing all the words, originally formatted for OHP slides but easy to translate into most projection software using utility programs. Whilst doing this I spotted a rider on one of the songs which said that “songs published by the Taizé Community were not covered by the CCL licence and permission to copy or display had to be sought directly” (or words similar to that). I did some research and found that there were lots of others in the same position. The well known books such as Mission Praise and the big publishing houses like Kingsway and Integrity Music are well covered by the CCL licence but some others, particularly those in the catholic tradition, are not.

Many years ago we put together a song book of our own as we couldn’t find a published book which covered the wide range of material that we needed and didn’t want to give out an arm full of books every service. It is many songs from this book that we now have difficulty with. At the time each song was researched and permission sought from the copyright holder, sometimes with a royalty fee. It looks like that, now we wish to change media, we have to start this all over again.

The availability of the CCL licence has certainly made multi-media worship easier, but it has not eliminated all of the problems.

This entry was posted on 15 Nov 2006 at 10:04 by Rick and is filed under ChurchTech, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.