The first of the two main copyright licences available is specifically designed for the needs of Roman Catholic parishes. The annual cost is reasonable, and varies according to the size of your Mass attendance. An inexpensive extension licence covering any schools in the parish is also available (schools can also purchase an independent licence if their parish does not have or want a Calamus licence). If there is more than one church or Mass centre in a parish, all are covered by a single licence as long as the Mass attendance figure includes all Masses centres.

This licence covers all orders of service and other sheets produced for a congregation over the course of a year. Many parishes have this facility and use it in conjunction with their existing resource books. It covers both words and the music lines of congregational refrains. Special arrangements exist for schools who don't produce sheets but make use of OHP transparencies.

The material covered includes all the St Thomas More Group of composers, Christopher Walker, Bernadette Farrell, Paul Inwood, everything published by OCP, GIA and WLP, McCrimmon, the music of Taizé, etc, etc - in other words, most of the music that up-to-date parishes are currently using in hymn books such as Laudate. It also covers all the music contained in Psallite, the recent collection of psalms and antiphons for the 3-year cycle (for further details, see the Magnificat Music website).

Those needing to run off items for their choirs or music groups need a separate arrangement. Currently this is running at 10p per item per copy under normal circumstances for one-off occasions only - so if you want to copy 1 item for 25 choir members, this will cost you 25 x 10p = £2.50. 10 copies for 25 choir members would be £25.00. For longer-term copying (i.e. not just for one-off occasions but for continual use), inquire using the contact details below.

Further information at the Decani Music website, or e-mail Decani Music or phone 0845 456 8392 (local rate call). They are very helpful, not only concerning the licence but also regarding copyright issues in general.

The CCLI licence

This licence (the initials stand for Church Copyright License International) is administered by an international firm, and covers hundreds of thousands of items used in the evangelical Christian market. The amount of material in use in Catholic churches is miniscule by comparison, but your licence fee covers all the other vast quantities of material, even if you would never want to use it. The CCLI licence is accordingly considerably more expensive than the Calamus licence. The administrators claim that their licence covers all your copyright needs, and many parishes have mistakenly invested in it under the impression that they are covered for all the material administered by Calamus (see above). They are not. At one time, approximately 50% of the parishes in our diocese were paying annually for a CCLI licence but never reproducing anything controlled by CCLI..... Material covered by the CCLI licence which some parishes are likely to want includes all Kevin Mayhew copyrights, songs by writers such as Graham Kendrick, and very recently the music of the Iona Community has been brought into the scheme. However, if you only ever use a few of these items it is less expensive to approach the publishers direct for one-off permissions.

If you have more than one church or Mass centre in your parish, CCLI insists that you must take out a separate licence for each location; so this can get extremely expensive. In addition, the licence does not cover music lines but only words. Schools have to take out their own licence - there is no extension licence as there is with Calamus.

If you have had a CCLI licence and decide that you no longer need one, CCLI will send you a reminder which suggests that you may be at risk of possible legal action, etc. Sometimes parishes have received this even if they have never had a CCLI licence. If you have not in fact been, or will no longer be, reproducing CCLI-controlled material, simply ignore this. Some parishes have renewed their CCLI licences for years quite unnecessarily because they were frightened by these reminders.

Included in the price of the CCLI licence is an MCPS video licence for ‘amateurs’ making recordings of weddings or other services. However, if you are using a professional video recording firm for your recording, they should already have their own MCPS licence.

Further information at the CCLI website: http://www.ccli.co.uk