Downloading questions

[ksonix]

Hello, I am going to be directing a church choir soon and I thought an efficient way to get music to the members would be to create a website so the choir members could download songs that I bought on itunes as opposed to burning a bunch of CDs or tapes for them. When I mentioned this in a meeting, people argued that it was illegal. Then I said, 'We've been making tapes of these songs for years, why is it illegal all of a sudden?'On a side note, I started thinking about all of the myspace pages that have songs posted from commercial artists. Is that illegal?Can someone clear all this up?Is the web site illegal?Have the tapes been illegal all these years?K-Sonix

[gitarrero]

well that depends on the laws in your country. Here in Switzerland it's like that in your case: If the site (where the mp3s are) is a private site with NON PUBLIC Access (meaning the public can't access), basically it won't be a problem since you only give the songs to a bunch of friends, which is "private use". Having said that, it's still a gray area.I don't know how the things are in the states...

[edteja]

It is illegal. It is not suddenly illegal, it always has been. Private use does not extend to giving it to friends unless you give them the only copy, such as a CD you bought. If you make a copy of songs on a CD and give it to people, it is illegal. Many of the songs on myspace are actually links to an artist who posted them. That is a gray area.

[zink]

Definitely not legal. Copying printed music for your choir members also isn't legal. Once in awhile, a church gets busted for this and the fines are astronomical.

[augustheat]

Quote:Hello, I am going to be directing a church choir soon and I thought an efficient way to get music to the members would be to create a website so the choir members could download songs that I bought on itunes as opposed to burning a bunch of CDs or tapes for them. When I mentioned this in a meeting, people argued that it was illegal. Then I said, 'We've been making tapes of these songs for years, why is it illegal all of a sudden?'On a side note, I started thinking about all of the myspace pages that have songs posted from commercial artists. Is that illegal?Can someone clear all this up?Is the web site illegal?Have the tapes been illegal all these years?K-SonixK:With regard to the Christian genre, there are a few exception to the rule. Having a CCLI license does give you some legal rights under their licensing agreement. Rather than get into it here, I would check out their web site at www.ccli.com. They pretty much license everything iin the genre. This would be a great resource for you to find out what you CAN and CAN'T do as a church. There's some great information there about chorale music...Blessings,Craig