Media licensing in ministry

Ben Swift is undertaking a PhD exploring the connections between music and computers. In this post, Ben explores how Christians can unwittingly use  media inappropriately in their ministries, and discusses some legal issues to be aware of. Ben also offers a great solution for Christians creating media and making it available to as many people as possible.

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Multimedia montages can be an engaging way of presenting information to the congregation. With iMovie on your laptop, you can throw together a punchy and effective ad for an upcoming event on the train on your way to work (or wherever you throw that sort of thing together). One thing we have to be careful of, though, is respecting Australian copyright law in the things we do in church. Romans 13:7 says “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.” As Christians, we have a responsibility to make sure that we aren’t doing anything illegal, and that we are paying the appropriate revenue and royalties when we use licenced media in our presentations and leaflets. First up, I should say that I’m not a lawyer. If you want advice on a particular media licencing issue facing your church, you should probably listen to someone more qualified than me. What I hope I can do is make you aware of some of the legal issues to consider when you use multimedia (or printed material) in church.

Bill’s Mistakes

Consider, as an example, my mate Bill. Bill is putting together an ad for an upcoming church camp. He cuts together some footage from the same camp the previous year, as well as some clips from Cliffhanger (the theme of the camp is ‘Hanging On’) he found on YouTube. He splices in some info about the dates, the cost, and who to talk to for more information. To finish it off, Bill takes a song from one of his favourite albums and adds a pumping soundtrack. It all looks very slick and professional, and is a much better way of getting people excited about the camp than three lines of plain text in the church bulletin.

Has Bill broken the law? Well, yes, unfortunately. Cliffhanger is under copyright, and is released under a licence, as all movies and songs are. So is the song he used for the soundtrack. The licence describes what you can do with the content. Most mainstream (and even most indie) content is released under a restrictive commercial licence which forbids the sort of derivative work (that is, a work in which the the licenced content is used) which Bill has made for his ad. Lots of info sheets regarding copyright in Australia are available from the Australian Copyright Council.

Now, Bill can contact the owner of the licence for Cliffhanger, which is one of the big movie studios. For a fee, he can pay to use the clips from the movie in his ad. He can similarly contact the record company and pay a licence fee to use the song for the soundtrack. However, this can be prohibitively expensive in a church. It’s hard to justify not being able to pay an assistant minister because half the church budget goes on licencing fees for snazzy multimedia announcements. Without paying the fees, though, Bill is unable to legally use the licenced content in his ad, regardless of the fact that he is not profiting from it.

One Solution: Creative Commons

One solution to this problem is to use material released under a less restrictive licence. One such licence is the Creative Commons (CC) licence. The Creative Commons licence was developed to give artists more control over the way their work is used, and also to promote the sharing and adaptation of content which is so tricky under commercial licences. The creator of the work specifies how their work can be used, based upon the following choices:

• Attribution: the work can be used and performed as long as the original creator is credited.
• Share Alike: the work may be incorporated into new works, but only if the derivative works are released under the same licence.
• Noncommercial: others can use your work freely, but can’t charge for it.
• No Derivative Works: the work can be used as is, but cannot be incorporated into new works.

If an artist wishes to release their work under a CC licence, they decide which of these four conditions they wish to enforce, and then generate the appropriate licence (including all the legal fidgie-widgieness) from the CC Licence my Work page.

Creators are free to select as many or as few of the conditions as they desire. For example, say a creator wants to be credited for any derivative works in which their content is used, but doesn’t care about any of the other conditions. They can release their work under a CC “Attribution” licence, the details of which can be obtained from the Licence page.

Bill’s Solution

Bill decides he’s going to play by the book and not use the material which he isn’t licenced to use. Instead, he decides to find some music and video which is licenced in such a way that he can use it in his church ad. He decides the best way to do this is to search the web for CC licenced work. Luckily, there is a special search engine on the CC.org website which can do just that.

CC logo courtesy of creativecommons.org

Now, since Bill is looking for video and audio to use in a derivative work (the video ad for church), he can’t use any CC licenced material with the ‘No Derivative Work’ stipulation, but he is free to use any other content as long as he respects the artists wishes on attribution, commercialisation and relicencing. Luckily, there is heaps of useful stuff on the web that fulfils these criteria, and Bill is able to find some footage and music to complete his video for church. There is no royalty to pay, and no specific permission is necessary, the content creator has already given permission in the CC licence, as long as the conditions of the licence are adhered to.

It’s important to remember that the content isn’t necessarily free, you may still have to pay the creator (some artists do release their work for free, but that isn’t a condition of the CC licence). What it does mean is that the work is royaltyfree – you don’t need to pay any ongoing royalties to reuse, distribute or broadcast the content. Those permissions are automatically granted in the CC licence.

Conclusion: Copyright is important for Christian ministry

It’s really easy to ignore copyright infringement at church. After all, we’re not making a profit out of the content we use, and it seems like such a hassle considering it only becomes an issue occasionally. However, by taking advantage of Creative Commons licenced content, we can obey all the laws, and also support artists who are similarly fed up with the restrictive nature of most commercial licences There’s a ton of useful information at the Creative Commons website, which is far more comprehensive (and probably clearer) than what I’ve mentioned here, and I encourage you to check it out. And if you are creating content of your own, I encourage you to release it to your brothers and sisters all over the world under a CC licence – I’m licencing this article under a noncommercial share alike CC licence.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue. What are some of the problems you’ve had with licencing in church? Are there any places on the web you’ve found great CC content?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.