I know my rights, guv

It is not unreasonable that creative people should receive financial reward for their efforts (or the economy of Jersey would collapse - but that's the subject of a future post.) After all, we wouldn't want to see Andrew Lloyd Webber or Lady Gaga languishing in a garret, now would we? (the question is rhetorical.)

But there does come a point at which the administrative costs of putting another 4p into Cliff Richard's pension fund become disproportionate, and point to the absurdity inherent not in the law of intellectual property itself, but in the application of that law to the bitter end.

The big record companies, fed up with the loss of revenue from P2P networks, are targeting churches and hairdressing salons because they are easy prey. The PPL licence was introduced on 1 January 2012 - if you play a CD or a cassette or even an MP3 in your place of work (or parish hall) you now have to cough up to keep a few dozen people in luxury for the rest of their lives. Oh, and you'll need a PRS licence as well. PRS splits your 4p two ways - 2p to Sir Andrew, and the other 2p to his publisher and record label (let them squabble over the proceeds.)

Copyright enforcers are the new brigands. That they have the law behind them means little - so do the outfits that clamp your car and demand a ransom for its release. Put a CD or a tape on in your rest room in your tea-break, or in your loo, you girls who work in hairdressing salons, and you can expect a visit from the heavies - you're playing music, and a member of the public with acute hearing could hear it - so cough up, or we break both yer arms.

The reporting requirements for small rural churches are now such as to inspire the ghost of Charles Dickens to pick up the quill again. They make the law, and certainly the application of it, look a ass. The combined PPL/PRS licence now threatens to make every keep-fit group hiring a church hall keep records of needle time across hundreds of recording labels. Not quite accurate records, of course, but approximate.

In this first year of reporting we, the church officers responsible for reporting our various hall user groups' needle time once we've collated them, only have to supply approximate percentages in four categories - Christian, classical, choral and modern pop, a ludicrous categorisation which could only have been put in place by a more than usually intelligent aardvark. That's a relief in a way, because I don't get paid by CCLI to do their tax-collecting work for them. But I am accountable to my PCC, and I am a charity trustee because I'm a member of that PCC.

So I think I am probably obliged by my trusteeship to ensure that none of our licence money goes to CD labels that haven't actually been played. Good stewardship, the Charity Commission calls it.

And that rather stands the reporting requirement on its head. CCLI should be producing the evidence that none of our church money has been paid to somebody who didn't deserve it, even if was only a fraction of a penny. For justice to be done, every group that plays music during its activities in a church hall will need a needle-time recordist who is also an expert in copyright law. Then they will know, and Sir Cliff will know, that that extra penny in his royalties that cost £25 to raise, by volunteer tax collectors, was raised lawfully.

Think I'll put a CD of Bach organ music on now to clear my head. It's 51 years old, this recording. It's the one we put on in church when it's open, so that metal thieves will think there's somebody in there, and go away. It's also out of copyright, ho-ho. Sorry, Sir Andrew. Sorry, Sir Cliff. Sorry, Your Ladyship. 

combined cost to our small rural parish church of CCLI copyright licences, PPL and PRS licences this year - £300, all but a penny or two.

Lord Lloyd-Webber's personal fortune - according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2012 - is £590,000,000, give or take a bob or two. That's more than three times what David Beckham has amassed by kicking balls round fields.

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences

It's a pity that the editors of modern church hymnals and books of worship don't give as much attention to the quality of editing as they do to the copyright of their typography, and the intellectual property rights of their songwriters.

I have two copies of the SATB version of Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New, published by Kevin Mayhew Limited. The second version (and I am being very careful to avoid words with very precise meanings in the publishing world for the moment) contains quite a lot of corrections in the texts of hymns and in their musical notation compared with the first, but nowhere is there any acknowledgement of that fact. But it gets worse. In one hymn there's a different number of verses, and in the melody-only edition yet another. Topping up the collection of church hymnals because of wear and tear (the bindings are decidedly unstrong) means that the choir and congregation are singing from incompatible versions of the same hymn book.

To an ex-bibliographer and library cataloguer this hymnal is a nightmare, for it poses the question: when does a reprint become a new edition? The publishers evidently consider SATB version 2 to be a reprint, because it is given the same ISBN number as the first, and you have to look hard to be able to tell the two versions apart. It is, to put it mildly, a little bit naughty.

I have drawn attention to some of the most glaring mistakes in musical notation in this hymnal elsewhere in this blog, for example

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2008/12/orange-brick-revised.html

but now that copyright holders are becoming more aggressive in their assertion of their rights, let's just look at some of the difficulties that even those of us who want to stay on the right side of the law and not see ourselves and our fellow PCC members or our incumbent fined or banged up in chokey for the rest of their natural face.

The Music Reproduction Licence (MRL) from Church Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) allows a PCC to reproduce the in-copyright music of some hymns for use in, say, special orders of service, provided a copyright notice is given in a prescribed form. I have no problem with that.  But what if that music contains glaring errors? Is resetting it in a music notation program such as Sibelius, Finale, or Noteworthy and then including it in a special booklet ("for use in acts of divine worship, including weddings and funerals" - we have to say that, so that there is no misunderstanding) a breach of copyright?  If the music is actually out of copyright, no. But what if it is still in copyright? I imagine it would be no defence to say "but, your Honour, they'd put an A-flat when it should have been a G-sharp, so we just put it right."

In our churches nobody sets out with the deliberate intention to steal, but the presence of a photocopier in the church office is all too great a temptation for those ignorant of the law. In essence running off a dozen copies of a anthem from a borrowed volume from the RSCM is just as much theft as running a pirate DVD copying operation from the vicar's vestry: the only difference is scale - shoplifting v. armed robbery.

In a small rural parish the legal obligations of PCCs are fast outrunning the abilities of officers to cope, and diocese doesn't help when its officers put out circular letters suggesting that when a church buys a set of hymnals it acquires copyright in those hymnals. So to put the record straight I was to give a brief report to our Deanery Synod tomorrow, backed up by a fact-sheet giving brief details of and contact numbers for CCLI, CCL, MRL, CVL, PPL, PRS, Licensing Act 2003 permissions, Bodies of People Approvals, Grand Rights, and oh, a few other things, and what to do about them. All in one neat, brief document, using words gleaned from official publications and websites.

I sent a copy to CCLI, more out of courtesy than anything. A day before Synod I received an e-mail from CCLI saying that my fact-sheet had been referred to Upstairs, and I couldn't 'use' it until I'd been given clearance.

I think that's one for the Human Rights Court, me.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to write to the Bishops, and ask if they could please arrange for my pension  to be increased to £26,000 after tax - just to poverty level, I'm not greedy. I'm on about half that, and I'm working harder and for longer hours than ever I was when I was in paid employment.

Perhaps I should write a book of worship songs...