Week One Readings

It is ironic that we would be talking and reading about copyright issues this week. I work part time for a mega church located in Texas. We are currently being audited from CCLI to make sure we are obeying our copyright guidelines. We have faced some opposition from some who believe that we can just throw lyrics on a screen and broadcast them with out giving credit for the use. We wish it was the easy but we have to abide by the rules or risk the chance of ultimately being sued by the author of the song. I am pretty familiar with copyright I can remember taking a class during high school called mass media law were we learned and studied cases that involved copyright infringement and other legal issues. We were even thought a way to copyright a piece of work for short term while you are applying to get a piece copyrighted. We were told a simple way of just mailing the piece of work you want copyrighted to yourself that has been postmarked is a temporary fix until you work has been officially copyrighted.