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:

• Recording Church Services On Computer
• Changing The Recordingsmusic For Your Church Services
• Changing The Recordings Music For Your Church Services Near Me

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;”

You’ll want to put a link to your iTunes store page on your church website, and perhaps also on your bulletin each week. SermonCloud - A free mp3 services site for churches. Sermon Cloud hosts your mp3 files as well as giving you the ability to stream them, have people subscribe and comment on them and many other services. Pastor David Olumuyide preaches on: Changing the mode of your life.Home service - Via Skype. To give through Paypal: paypal.me/setthecaptives Thank you to t. Now, if someone wants to watch our service live, they can visit our OVC live broadcast page and watch the service on our church’s site. I haven’t put them to use on our site yet, but I believe Ustream also provides other tools you can integrate on your site: an “on air now” button to let your users know when the service is live; a. Service Plans: Create unique plans for each service, including details on people, songs, and notes. Service Types: File plans under ministry categories, like Children’s Ministry, or by services, like Contemporary. Order of Service: Set the order and length of each item in the service so your team knows what to expect.

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:

Recording Church Services On Computer

• US Copyright Office
• Presbyterian Church (USA) Legal Resource Manual

Changing The Recordingsmusic For Your Church Services

I hope this is helpful.

Changing The Recordings Music For Your Church Services Near Me

Tags: audio, ccli, church, copyright, exemption, fair use, music cd