Copyright laws and live performances

Annie Dalton, graphic artist,
created this poster for us.

I loathe the theft of intellectual property. There is much of it in the churches of the land. Choirs are rife with those who choose to make bootleg copies of music for practice purposes.

For example, we are singing Missa Gaia this month. Floating around are illegal copies of the CD. Some say that they had to since there are two groups doing this piece in southeastern Ontario, and Amazon ran out of copies. This is so wrong.

Musicians, of all people, do not have pension plans. They rely on royalties.
It is difficult earning a living in Canada as a musician. We just don't have the population or the venues. Many church organists have a 'day' job! Churches are in decline, as well, and many are having to close their doors.

Royalties won't make musicians rich, despite the millions of us who enjoy liturgical music. We have many Canadians who do write music. We must respect them.

 In my case, I received a royalty from my book sales this month. I think it is for the last 6 months. It was $22.50.



Copyright fees depend upon the size of the church.

Christian Copyright Licensing Inc. (CCLI)
Web:   www.ccli.com

The Christian Copyright Licensing Inc. (CCLI) was created to help churches comply with the copyright law and to compensate copyright owners fairly for such compliance. The CCLI issues licences to reproduce songs in bulletins, liturgies and congregational songsheets; make slides and transparencies of songs; print songs in customized songbooks; make customized arrangements of songs and record worship services for tape ministry.

The CCLI Church Streaming and Podcast License allows you to stream or podcast your live-recorded worship music on your church's website or other streaming service.

SOCAN

The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada is a not-for-profit organization that represents the Canadian performing rights of millions of Canadian and international music creators and publishers. 

The performing right that SOCAN administers on behalf of creators of musical works and their publishers is a right granted under Canada's Copyright Act. The Copyright Board of Canada certifies SOCAN's tariffs.

What is Public Domain Music?

In Canada, a musical work enters the public domain 50 years after the year of the death of the last surviving composer/author of the work. No fees are typically due if all the works in a performance are public domain. You are responsible for submitting a program to SOCAN for final determination. Please contact SOCAN at 1-866-944-6226 or licence@socan.ca.

US and Canadian law is pretty much the same:

Copyright and the Church

This is specifically allowed in copyright law. But, if you are performing music in a concert setting you would need permission. 

“My church makes audio/video recordings of worship for shut-ins.  Must I obtain permission?”

Unfortunately the answer is yes.  Many churches violate copyright law when they record their worship services and provide copies to members, visitors, shut-ins, etc.  If you do not have permission, you are in violation of copyright law and you are exposing your church to potentially large fines.   

“My church produces instant DVDs of worship.  We need permission, right?”

Yes, churches producing “instant DVDs” of their worship services and handing them out within a few moments of the end of worship need to obtain permission for each copyrighted work included.  This not only applies to songs, but copyrighted readings, film clips, etc.  It does not matter if you sell them or give them away.

“When is it necessary to seek permission to use a copyrighted work?”

The simple answer is: always.  Whenever a copyrighted work is reproduced in any form, permission must be obtained: print, projection, recording, web-based uses.   This applies to bulletins, song books, handouts, projections, recordings for shut-ins, an “extra” copy for the accompanist, videos of worship services and  musicals, children’s Christmas programs, etc.

http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/ 
www.ucc.org/music-arts/

Copyright Board of Canada

http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/societies-societes/index-e.html
http://www.socan.ca/licensees/faq-licensing 

The Trouble With Copyright Laws & Collective Intellectual Property

It's in the news. Who really owns it? Truly, it is the first person to patent it.

Copyright Laws are government-granted monopolies that control who can use or view new works of music, film, or literature. Actors, writers, film crews, and those who work on a film project, may be able to share revenues. The end result is that some actors are sitting on fortunes, others go from gig to gig. This, perhaps, is why a family cannot visit a theatre without spending $100.

The pharmaceuticals are a whole different story, with millions invested in research, and profoundly limiting access to generic drugs which are much more affordable.

The question is, who actually created this intellectual property, and thereby owns it? In some cases, it is the first person to register the copyright in the patent office. In most cases, inventions are built on the creations and the shoulders of those who have gone before us!

Alexander Graham Bell's phone is a prima facie case.

Bell filed his patent on February 14, 1876.

An American engineer, Elisha Gray, filed a statement of intent to patent, for a similar item, on the same day. McQuaig and Brooks (The Trouble With Billionaires, 2010) write that the log book at the patent office enters Bell at patent #5 and Gray #39 that day. 

They speculate that one or the other could have sent their patent in by mail, and the order received may not have been the order in which it was developed. 

Are you old enough
to remember punch cards?
Sent off to the university main frame,
only to be returned weeks later.
'Syntax error, line 535!'

Not only that, but Bell's submission had design problems and he had to redesign and refile it later. (Original source: Alperovitz & Daly (2008), Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking Our Common Inheritance

garalperovitz.com/UnjustDeserts.html)

Copyright Laws vs. Collective Intellectual Property
Copyrights and patents, especially in the US, contribute to people like Bill Gates, who made a fortune from something he did not wholly invent. Gary Kildall, who put much work into computer language CP/M, had CP/M adapted by Tim Paterson, which was patented by the latter, and then Peterson's patent was bought by Gates and Microsoft.

Why should Bill gates be worth $53 billion?

Who truly invented the computer?

The Trouble

Was it Bill Gates? Apparently not. His OS was inferior to that designed by Kildall, and it is said that Gates sold out his friend. Gates' product needed work.

Did it begin with the Jacquard loom: punched cards and mechanisms  designed to change silk threads into a woven product in a fraction of time? From producing 1 inch per day if silk material, to creating 2 feet per day, production speed and profits increased, employment decreased.

• Babbage invented the calculator. 
• Hollerith used the punched-card technology of the loom to create a tabulator, decreasing the time to crunch data. His company merged with 3 others in 1911, to become International Business Machines (IBM).
• By the 1930 IBM was building 1500 per year. Unlike the first phone or fax machine (who could you call?!!), the passing of the Social Security Act of 1935 resulted in the US government buying 500 such machines from IBM.



Do you know your times tables?

• During WW II, the U.S. Army funded IBM who created an automatic digital calculating device 51' x 8', based on the punchcard technology.

• Two engineers at uPennsylvania, Eckert & Mauchly, with more funds from the US government, developed the electronic computer in the 1940s.
• By the 1950s, technology resulted in computers that were ever smaller, faster, and better. The US Air Force funded inventions such as the mouse.
• New inventions: graphical user interface (GUI); the keyboard, screen, menu, that allows the drag and drop of modern day. MS-DOS (the much-maligned Microsoft Operating System) prepared us for Windows.

How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance

 and Why We Should Take It Back

How to tax

How is it that Gates can sit on his $53 BILLION, an amount - if he counted it at $1 per second- would count it in 1680 years! What irks many of us is that while some people like this can become philanthropists, most do not pay their fair share of taxes. Their money doesn't go to people who need it, but to university buildings or a hospital wing with their name on it, not into the fabric of society.

Fair dealing in Canada

Often people are hired to create window designs.
THis is intellectual property, too.

What is "fair dealing" - Copyright Law 9 Sep 2008 ... What kinds of uses are legal in the United States under fair use but not clearly legal in Canada under fair dealing?
FAIR DEALING IN CANADA The Canadian Copyright Act (R.S.C. 1985)
What is "fair dealing (Canada)""fair use (US)"?

In Canada, the principal exception to the exclusive rights of copyright holders is called "fair dealing". Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting. This list is exhaustive, such that fair dealing applies only to those categories of dealings that are specifically mentioned.

The equivalent user right under American copyright law, "fair use," is, by contrast, an open-ended system which adopts a non-exhaustive approach to categories of dealings, and focuses instead on principles for determining whether a use strikes an equitable balance between user and copyright holder interests. These principles include, but are not limited to:

• determinations of the purpose and character of the use; 
• the nature of the work; 
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the entire work; 
• the effect of the derived work on the market for the original. 

Fair dealing relies on similar fairness principles, but only within the scope of the itemized categories of dealings. The term fair use is thus more expansive than fair dealing and the terms should not be used interchangeably.

Acts Undertaken without Motive of Gain

Motive of gain

29.3 (1) No action referred to in section 29.4, 29.5, 30.2 or 30.21 may be carried out with motive of gain.

What happens with many media, is that they take a YouTube video, put an ad in front, and credit YouTube, rather than the person who created the video. This is just plain wrong.

You can read my story of theft of my entire video from a TV news outlet.



I was ruminating on my blog designs. Having taught web design to elementary students, I thought long and hard about it. I have several blogs: one for my book, this one for my personal writing, one for educational resources. I wanted to be very clear about the goals and the purpose of each. I don't want to confound my book information with Ontario Senior Health information, for example.

Plagiarism and Copyright

Plagiarism and copyright: I have written about at length, and yet it still needs to be said. There are some bloggers finding that they are prone to theft of their intellectual property. This include images and written content of all kinds. Sam, in Singapore, created a succinct post on this. He also told me to visit: Copyscape, to determine if your site has been plagiarized.

PUBLIC DOMAIN DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN USE ANYTHING YOU FIND. PROTECT YOURSELF: WATCH FOR PLAGIARISM.

This blog post gives the writer some guidelines. Both images, and text  are copywritten. "Public domain" is a concept that a lot of people throw around without truly understanding it. "Public domain" does not mean the same thing as "on the Web" or even "publicly available." In fact, the fact that a work is online or publicly available is no indication whatsoever of whether it is in the public domain. Fair Use (US) and Fair Practice means you can use snippets to promote another site, but not copy it whole.

Materials That a Company Licenses to You
I.E., Microsoft: Media Elements and Templates. You may have access to media images, clip art, animations, sounds, music, shapes, video clips, templates and other forms of downloadable content ("media elements") associated with the service. If so, you may copy and use the media elements, and license, display and distribute them, along with your modifications as part of your software products, including your web sites, but you may not (i) sell, license or distribute copies of the media elements by themselves or as part of any collection, or product if the primary value of the product is in the media elements; (ii) grant customers of your product any rights to license or distribute the media elements; (iii) license or distribute any of the media elements that include representations of identifiable individuals, governments, logos, initials, emblems, trademarks, or entities for any commercial purposes or to express or imply any endorsement or association with any product, entity, or activity; or (iv) create obscene or scandalous works, as defined by law at the time the work is created, using the media elements.

Public Domain Clipart

when cats fly @ Bayshore Mall, 2010

     A lot of black and white clipart is classified as public domain, which means its original copyright is no longer in effect, and it can be used by the public freely and without penalty.  In general, this situation covers works created before 1923.  There are piles of free and inexpensive public domain clipart available on the internet.  The challenge lies in determining its authenticity

Several online sources of free public domain clipart that you might want to check out. Always read the "Terms of Use" or "License" page on any free site.  If there is no guarantee that all items are in the public domain, then some of a site's images could have been gleaned and added without verifying its copyright status.

Some other helpful sites

• YouTube “Copyright Tips” page
• The Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center (US law)
• US Copyright Office (US law)
• UK Intellectual Property Office (UK law)

More information about copyright

Many musicians are happy to have you post some of their stuff. It is free advertising. I have e-mailed a couple, and put their music to my photos.


The best photos are the natural nature sounds of places, like Algonquin and Lake Superior Parks.

For the YouTube Partnership Program, it's NOT OK to use someone else's material, even if you:

• edit together or “mash-up” other works
• alter it by 10%, 20%, 30%, etc.
• only use 30 seconds of a song or video clip
• found it on the internet
• didn't receive a copyright notice from anyone
• paid for it (bought a CD or digital song, for example)
• give proper attribution or credits
• are only singing the words of a favorite copyrighted song

Some other helpful sites

• Our “Copyright Tips” page
• The Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center (US law)
• US Copyright Office (US law)
• UK Intellectual Property Office (UK law)

Shout Out to a flash mob

I met a new creation. Flash mob.
I do not know how long this video will be up. But it was the 24th season of Oprah. They put together a flash mob. I would love to be part of something like this. The energy and the spirit of it all.

You notice that someone illegally posted the video and Harpo caught up with them. Another lesson in copyright violations.
Oprah's Kickoff Party Dance

It's the flash mob that took over Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Watch 21,000 of Oprah's biggest fans perform one of the biggest dances in the world to the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling."

You can watch the video on Oprah.com, where it is rightfully placed.
The video was only up less than a week before they were caught!

YouTube, Copyright & Public Domain

I walked down to Bala to see the falls. I took a video of our heroic EMS crews for two reasons. 1) to show the power of the water from the south falls.

2) to laud the men and women who risked their lives to pull the bodies from the water.
For those unfamiliar with the water, they find it hard to understand the power of the water.

That said, I contacted CTV News to tell them about the incident. They asked permission to use my video, which I granted.
Then, I received a short e-mail from a Global TV reporter who asked if it was my video, and if I took the videos. I said I was. Conversation ended. Then I became curious. Why did he want to know?! I e-mailed him back. He said,

"Sometimes we will utilize you tube video in the show but we always check to ensure its the original thing and not a dub from another source. This has happened before but I prefer checking all sources as a rule of thumb."

My husband was watching the news and saw my video. I e-mail him back and said we saw my video on TV, and shouldn't he credit me with it?

He said,

"I hear you Jennifer; however once its on you tube it becomes public domain--and ends up being you tube sourced as the provider --but I have no problem crediting you...I will put your name up over the video for 11pm."

I did not accept this, checking for info I found none. I then e-mailed Dr. Michael Geist, uOttawa, and asked him. He e-mail me back and told me that,

"No - not true. Just because it is on YouTube, doesn't mean that it is public domain. They may still be able to use a portion as fair dealing, but that doesn't mean there isn't copyright in the work."

I forwarded his message to the reporter, I think it important that we be clear on these things. Many, many people steal the intellectual property of one another's photos and text. Copyright is a pet peeve of mine, and the least understood. When I taught my elementary students I had a hard time explaining that you couldn't copy the entire Internet for your own project! Plagiarism is an important issue to me. Theft of both visual and textual work is unlawful.

As Dr. Geist says, you can quote a portion 'fair dealing', but not all.
My children saw CITY TV featured a portion, but not the whole thing. Again, fair dealing. The reporter got back to me, after consulting the corporate lawyer. He wrote,

"It is lawful to use the video as part of a legitimate news report on the subject of the video itself as a "fair dealing" with the work pursuant to Section 29 of the Copyright Act. Therefore, the use made of the video might be justified as "fair dealing" in the circumstances."

What we need to remember, also, is that this is Canadian law, and the Internet is a world-wide beast. I would be curious about the laws in other countries.

All of us must realise that we cannot use work that does not belong to us. It is simple to ask, as most of us who post photos, text, audio and video, are happy to share with the world, provided we are credited. In this, the age of technology, we must be careful to respect this, despite the ease with with we can copy this work. (And it IS work!)
Read more on Canadian laws: Respect intellectual property.

Read more from a US lawyer: Nine Copyright Myths of the Online World.
Myth #2: It's okay to use anything that's online, because if it's online, it's in the public domain and up for grabs

"Public domain" is a concept that a lot o f people throw around without truly understanding it. "Public domain" does not mean the same thing as "on the Web" or even "publicly available." In fact, the fact that a work is online or publicly available is no indication whatsoever of whether it is in the public domain.


~~~~~~~~
References

• What is "fair dealing" - Copyright Law 9 Sep 2008 ... What kinds of uses are legal in the United States under fair use but not clearly legal in Canada under fair dealing?
• 1 FAIR DEALING IN CANADA The Canadian Copyright Act (R.S.C. 1985 ...[PDF]
  

  What is "fair dealing"/"fair use"?

  In Canada, the principal exception to the exclusive rights of copyright holders is called "fair dealing". Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting. This list is exhaustive, such that fair dealing applies only to those categories of dealings that are specifically mentioned.
  The equivalent user right under American copyright law, "fair use," is, by contrast, an open-ended system which adopts a non-exhaustive approach to categories of dealings, and focuses instead on principles for determining whether a use strikes an equitable balance between user and copyright holder interests. These principles include, but are not limited to: determinations of the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the entire work; and, the effect of the derived work on the market for the original. Fair dealing relies on similar fairness principles, but only within the scope of the itemized categories of dealings. The term fair use is thus more expansive than fair dealing and the terms should not be used interchangeably.

Copyright laws in Canada

There are some bloggers finding that they are prone to theft of their intellectual property. This include images and written content of all kinds. Sam, in Singapore, created a succinct post on this. He also told me to visit: Copyscape, to determine if your site has been plagiarized.

I think that most media would find it is a crime. When they pay a journalist to write a piece, how can a blogger just reproduce it? Which is what they are doing. I contacted a media outlet, and they did not seem too concerned since the blogger had posted the original URL location. But I think it a slippery slope. Fairness aside, when we can read the entire news article elsewhere, why not post a reflection on the article, with a link? You are not adding to the body of knowledge by recreating a news item word-for-word.

In my mind, many are happy to have you quote a few sentences, but some people copy the entire post. Some put a link to the original post. but I don't think that is good enough.  In my mind, we amateurs are not so much reporting news, as presenting a take or a rant on an issue. Even news 'reporters', the professionals, are embedding their work with bias and a left or right point of view.

Copyright Act - R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42 (Section 29.2)

29.2 Fair dealing for the purpose of news reporting does not infringe copyright if the following are mentioned:

(a) the source; and

(b) if given in the source, the name of the

(i) author, in the case of a work,

Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42)

Full Document:  

• HTML | 
• XML [464 KB] | 
 
• PDF [758 KB]

Act current to 2011-11-14 and last amended on 2005-12-12. Previous Versions

If you put on your site that it is copywritten, then it is an infringement. I think the media must clamp down on this. You have to teach others how to respect your rights and stand up for yourself.

Lorelle explains what to do when you find your work has been stolen: talk to them, print out violations, request they do something. I would say demand it! I have blogged about plagiarism, an issue in universities, as well as high schools. I often had to teach students the difference between copying paragraphs and rewriting in your own words. Unfortunately, some parents did not see the problem! However, with incidences of Economic Espionage, we must be vigilant and set high standards across the board.

TIP:
One important thing for those with photos is to avoid putting such high resolution photos on that may be used by someone else. I keep mine, or try to, lower than 640 pixels.

Click on the icon to read about other points of view.