Our license
Here at Open Skies Praise, we've decided to release our music and the resources that go along with it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, or CC BY-NC 4.0 for short. It's a mouthful, but it's meant to allow you to use our music legally without paying us for it or breaking copyright law. Here are the basics of the license:
You are free to:
- Share - copy and redistribute it in any medium or format.
- Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon it.
As long as you do it under the following terms:
- Attribution - give us credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if you made changes. Don't do this in a way that suggests that we are endorsing you or your use of it.
- Non-commercial - don't use it for commercial purposes.
This is a paraphrase of the actual license - you can read it in its entirety at the Creative Commons website. We believe that this is the best license for us to use, because it gives you quite a bit of freedom to use, share, and modify our music, but we still get to keep a little bit of control over how that's done to make sure these resources stay free and available. Also, this license does not require you to inform us that you are using our resources, but we wouldn't mind knowing if they've been helpful!
Example of an attribution (For specific attribution information for each individual song, see our Songs page):
“I Will Rejoice” © 2017 by Open Skies Praise is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
If you are attributing us in a medium that doesn't include hyperlinks (for example, printed material) write out the full Creative Commons license URL in addition to its abbreviation:
“I Will Rejoice” © 2017 by Open Skies Praise is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. View the entire license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Attribution during church services
The Creative Commons license that we're using requires that you attribute us when using our music. This is easy to do with printed materials, but a little harder to do when performing a song live or displaying lyrics. Luckily, there's a section in the United States copyright law specifically addressing these kinds of situations. U.S. Code Title 17 Chapter 1 § 110 states that:
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
...
(3) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly;
Although we're not lawyers, it's our interpretation of the copyright law that performing or displaying our music during a church service is exactly what this section of the law describes, and therefore doesn't count as infringing on our copyright. Because of this, we don't require attribution when using our music during a church service. However, we would certainly appreciate letting the people in your church know where the music came from. Also, keep in mind that this only applies to displaying and performing our music - any printed lyrics, chord sheets, or recordings that are distributed afterwards should still have proper attribution.
Questions?
If you'd like more information, or would like to ask about using our music in a specific way, feel free to contact us.