I recently participated in a free online webinar (free webinars are great) about church copyright. It may not sound exciting but it was extremely informative. I thought I had a good understanding of the whole thing, but learned a lot that I didn’t know before. As a result, I’m having to look into some additional licenses to make sure we are doing ministry with integrity in today’s world. It seems that CCLI doesn’t cover everything.

If it’s been a while since you’ve thought about this (or else never have), let me encourage to head over to a post at www.copyrightcommunity.com where they write on copyright issues for the Christian Art community. This post here has a downloadable pdf (Church Copyright Blanket Licenses: What’s Covered and What’s Not) that has a great summary of what is and is not covered under the different licensing options available to churches.If you are doing anything other than public domain hymns, you need to go there.

We could debate all day about whether it’s “right” or not that we have to be conscious of all this, but the fact is that we do need to be aware. Ignorance is never an excuse.

Image via www.sxc.hu