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Regarding musical copy write of sheet music:

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Mmauimike

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Hawaii

I am in a church gospel quartet and we have sheet music from a lot of different sources that we perform within our small church to some acclaim. Folks want us to record a CD and we would like to be able to share our talent with friends and family that live elsewhere or don't come to church. We would rent a studio and hire a professional mixer/editor and would therefore try to sell the CDs for a nominal fee to recoup those costs, but do not view this as a money-making endeavor.

We are pretty clear in our understanding that this would be an infringement of the copy write of the sheet music we may be using. My question is this: Could a judgment against us, in the unlikely event of an infringement suit, be for more than the value of any profits we might realize from the sale of the CDs? Some of the sheet music has been purchased but some other pieces may have been copied illegally. If we were to go out and buy four copies of each arrangement we want to use, does this typically give us the right to record the music for sale?
 


The Occultist

Senior Member
No, owning a copy does not permit you to reproduce the music. However, you may notice that there are a lot of albums out there of groups singing somebody else's music (known as "covers"), and, only due to the fact that everybody has heard of this series due to the non-stop commercials advertising them, I will reference those Kidz Bop albums or whatever they are. There is a legal way to be allowed to perform these songs and release the albums. What you need is a license to perform. There are agencies out there that will allow you to purchase these licenses, one such agency (and, as a matter of fact, the only one I actually know by name) is Harry Fox (www.harryfox.com). They even have some FAQ's on the site to help figure out which purchases will provide the most bang for your buck. Good luck!
 

FlyingRon

Senior Member
The word is "copyright". There are many rights involved here. First, your performance rights are usually covered via sweet deal the Performance Rights Organizations (PRO) have with the churches, so your use directly involved in ceremonies and church events is usually covered. Performance elsewhere will have to have the venue covered by an agreement with the PRO.

In order to produce a CD, you need mechanical rights. The bad news is you have to pay for those rights. The good news is that there is a compulsory license with a fixed statutory royalty which isn't that bad. It's per copy/per minute, but each song has a 500 copy/5 minute minimum of $45.50. So that amount per song is what you owe.

The mainstream publishers are represented via the Harry Fax Agency (Frequently Asked Questions) which makes it trivial to get the license. Other composers, you'll have to figure out where to pay the royalty.
 

The Occultist

Senior Member
I was not even aware that churches had a special licensing arrangement; that is really interesting!

I believe the FAQ that FR linked to includes a reference to a Single File or some such form of purchasing for licenses that I believe you will find in your favor considering the fact that you do not intend for the publication to reach more than the set number of copies distributed (2500 I think?).
 

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