Beware of the Copyright

I occasionally volunteer as a producer for weekend services at my church. Its a pretty large church with an auditorium that seats over 1700 to give you some perspective. The location where I serve is the broadcast campus. The services are live here and they are streamed in real-time to several other locations plus online. We have been doing this for years, way before the world shut down and all the kids started doing it. During the services, there is a person watching the feeds to ensure they are sending the content where it needs to go when it needs to get there.

On this particular weekend we had a special guest, someone who had been the runner-up on a previous season of a popular TV talent show. As with most of our special guests, we play a brief introduction video before they walk out on stage. This gives the audience some context for what they are about to experience and why we have invited this person to speak to them today.

The service started, production is going according to plan, and the speaker is in the wings. Great! Cue the intro video…then, chaos ensues in my headset! The feed monitor is telling me that the Facebook feed is down. Our website feed is down. Nothing is streaming. We’ve been shut down by the TV talent show in seconds. The brief introduction included a 2-minute clip from Youtube of this guest performing on national television during her audition. I don’t understand… we got the video from the internet. Enter, the accidental copyright infringement. No more service for anyone except those in the room.

We all learned an incredible lesson this particular weekend, one that after you’ve experienced it you are extremely careful not to repeat. Just because something is available on the internet does not mean you have the rights to use it. There are copyright laws that govern video, photographs, music, and more. Not only that, the major corporations that own these things are watching! Be sure you research and purchase the appropriate licenses.

As a volunteer I don’t have all of the specifics, but I do know that because there was no malicious intent, we were allowed to continue using the video for the in-person services only. Online and streaming we had to replace the offending portion with a slide that said something to the effect of “this portion of the service contains copyrighted content” so it couldn’t be seen by outside audiences.

Have you run into a copyright issue? Please email me with your story. I’d love to hear what happened so we can avoid these types of issues in the future!

Want to hear more? I was a guest on Joanne Dennison’s podcast “Sit in the Attendee’s Chair” where unpacked this topic a little more, it’s available where you listen to your podcasts. (link to Spotify here)

Visit tracybaer.com and visit her Tracy About Town section for more!