Recording the use of Copyright materials
Recording the use of Copyright materials
Parishes are to record the use of Copyright materials to ensure the owners get paid.
Step 1: Sign up
CCLI requires you to tell them every time you reproduce one of the songs they cover. This is so that they can pay the author and/or composer of the song their royalties for your use of the song.
You need a logon for the CCLI website, and to get your logon you need two six-digit numbers. These are printed on your annual “licence certificate” and are the same each year. You need your customer ID (at the top of the page) and your licence number (on the certificate, next to the expiration date).
If you can’t find these numbers, contact the Diocesan Office finance team at accounts@perth.anglican.org.
If you set your account up in a previous year, it continues when you have paid your fee for subsequent years.
Once you have the numbers, go to www.ccli.com.au. In the narrow navy band at the top of the screen is a tab “Support.” Click there, and then select the “Online Reporting Support” option and follow the instructions.
Choose a password that is easy to remember. You will be sent a confirmation email.
Step 2: Look it Up
CCLI covers a lot of church music, but not everything. It doesn’t cover everything in a whole hymnbook or songbook; it covers individual hymns and songs by particular authors. And it doesn’t need to cover things whose author or composer died before 1955. The works of long-dead people are “in the public domain” and you can copy them without permission.
But for more recent songs, if CCLI doesn’t cover it, you can’t print or project it. So, before you settle on a song, search it!
You can also search with the "song search” button (nb not “SongSelect” - this is a different product that costs extra!!) You can search by author, title, first line and more. Sometimes you may need to try more than one search category to find your song.
For example, “Shine, Jesus, shine” comes up under “Title,” whereas “Lord, the light of your love is shining” comes up under “Text.” If it doesn’t appear despite your ingenuity in searching, it is not covered by CCLI.
For example, no matter how you search for Dan Schutte, “Here I am Lord” or “I the Lord of sea and sky,” it does not come up, and it is not covered.
The same is true of all Taizé material; CCLI does not cover any Taizé songs. One License may licence Taizé songs.
Step 3: Annotate it Correctly
Authors have a “moral right” in law to be identified as the authors of their work. So for each song you print in a booklet or project onto a screen, the author needs to be listed with the song, not just at the end of the booklet. You also need to note at the end of every song, whether printed or projected, your CCLI number.
For example, the annotation after “Shine, Jesus, shine” may read: words © Graham Kendrick reproduced with permission CCLI XYZABC (your six-digit licence number).
Step 4: Report your usage frequently
Maybe you mostly sing from the books you own, and only occasionally print an extra song in a booklet or use a data projector for a special service or a funeral. In that case, on the occasions when you do print or project a copyright song, go online and record your usage at www.ccli.com.au using the logon and password you acquired in Step 1.
You won’t need to include “The Lord’s my shepherd” or “Amazing Grace” that you print or project at a funeral, or “Silent night” at Christmas, as these are in the public domain. But you will need to report “The Aye Carol” (Iona Community) at Christmas, and “Come as you are” (Deirdre Brown) at a family service, and “Touch the earth lightly” (Shirley Murray/Colin Gibson) at an eco-care themed service.
Maybe almost all your services have migrated from multiple books to a screen or a single booklet. In that case, you need to go online and record your usage every week. The system remembers your favourites so you can find them easily next time you use them. There are buttons to report print, digital, audio-recorded and translated uses of songs.
More than one person can assist with the reporting. It does not have to be the clergy person who led the service. A musician (who knows what was played and sung) or an office person (who knows what was printed or put in the PowerPoint presentation) can be among the copyright reporters.