And now, a rant...

[nockergeek]

Some of the programming and art team members from our church went to a conference in Chicago on media and copyright issues. See, we use contemporary secular songs and movie clips in our Sunday services to illustrate points in terms and forms that people are familiar with, so that they can get in touch with our messages in a comfortable way. However, that may change now that they're aware of what the deal is.

On the one hand, there's the music. For worship songs, which we resuse, we've licensed those for our regular use. However, for the contemporary music, which tends to be on a case-by-case, rarely-repeating-a-song basis (which we either use as opening tunes or as illustration tunes), we've just been covering those unofficially. Okay, so we have to license it to perform it now. No biggie; that's to be understood, right?

Well, we also have to pay fees to even have music to rehearse with. Can't replicate the lyrics legally without licensing them, or at the very least having everyone in the band buy the CD so that they get the liner notes... and hope said liner notes have lyrics. Otherwise, we'll have to have someone on staff who just deals with BMI and ASCAP to license everything. Not so bad, really, but a costly annoyance.

The film clips, however...

The restrictions on these things are ridiculous. Right now, we'll rent a bunch of films to peruse them for clips. When a good clip is found, the film's rented again, the 3-to-5 minute clip is either copied to tape or burned to DVD, and then shown during service. However, apparently, that's a no-no. You have to license the entire film to show even a clip, which can be around $100 to $200 per showing. We do two services, so if we want to use a five-minute excerpt from, say, Fellowship of the Ring or The Matrix, we might have to pay $400 to do so.

But we can still just have the excerpt, trimmed for time and content, to show, right? Wrong. Apparently, you have to buy the DVD (or VHS), and play the scene directly from that media -- no shifting it to another physical copy, even in part. That means no visual medley clips, which we've also done in the past. Further more, the only editing you can do is at the sound board during performance. You can't make that copy and block out swearing. I really don't have anything against swearing, but I can understand why it might not be appropriate in church... so your person running sound (if you even have one -- fortunately, we do) better have a good ear and fast reflexes, or else you're going to miss a stray "shit" or "fuck" here or there.

So, to recap... to show a 3-to-5 minute video clip:
1) You have to license it for public showing on a per-showing basis
2) You have to have it on original licensed media
3) You cannot perform any edits beforehand; all editing has to be done during the performance

So, unless we want to flagrantly disrespect the law (which is tempting, because we're getting no respect in turn from Big Media), our current method of evangelism is being chilled. The upshot is that we now have to either pay a lot of money for licenses (and someone to keep track of them), or force the arts and planning teams to come up with 100% original content. The original content is a good thing, but it's also very taxing on the church's artistic community to have to come up with completely new content on a weekly basis.

So, either way, it's a suck-suck situation. And all because Hollywood doesn't want to share even 5 minutes of its product for a higher cause unless they're getting their pockets lined.

Comments

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

In general, short clips used as part of a discussion are covered by fair use. For instance, a student writing about Stephen King's books can include a quote to illustrate a point or to discuss the themes it brings up without negotiating with Stephen King's publishers.

I'm not sure if recent legislation has altered fair use in the special cases of music and video. I don't think film teachers need to license films to show clips in class, for instance. If it has, I think there's a strong case for civil disobedience and fighting all the way.