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Hello ARSC Group: I have been a faithful member of ARSC for quite a few years now. Although this questions is not exactly focused on the preservation of recorded sound content, I hoping that someone on this list can provide some advice/input for a more personal inquiry, as I know there are quite a few people on this list-serve who have some copyright background/knowledge. I am a member of a smaller Roman Catholic church in Upstate New York. About a year ago, I began web streaming a live camera broadcasting 24/7 on YouTube for our church. For an entire year, there were no issues. Before we lost our YouTube account, we had over 900 unique instances each month where someone logged in to watch a regular church service, a funeral or a wedding. Then suddenly two months ago, YouTube sent me a notification that "due to multiple violations, your YouTube account was closed". There was no specific information as to why. I filed an appeal with no reply and we lost the account. My best guess is that sometimes our parish priest will play store-bought religious CD's for background music before mass, during confessions to hide any extraneous conversions, etc. and the music went through the sound system and through our streaming hardware which was then broadcast through the YouTube live stream and YouTube picked up on the copyrighted music and punted us for copyright violations. After doing a mass amount of research to find a qualified paid streaming service provider, I found more and more references pointing to the fact that if you broadcast your church services outside the four walls of your church, such as streaming your services, you need to purchase a rights license to be able to use the standard Roman Catholic church hymns in your streaming content. But these references conflict with other references that say we don't have to pay for a rights license. Some license companies ask that you report weekly a list of all the hymns sung in the services for the entire week. Some license companies state that you just pay a fixed fee to cover the church services for the entire year with no reporting. The streaming providers all say the same thing - no one is going to go through the time and trouble of suing a small catholic church for streaming hymns sung during a regular worship service - there's no money in it. There is no definitive answer for rights licensing protocol that I can find anywhere. It seems as the licensing companies are there to cash in on churches that are willing to pay to protect themselves. Our Diocese has not been able to provide any definitive answer either. There are not many churches in our diocese that do what we do. Apparently, streaming the Roman Catholic mass is not something many churches do in our area. So my question is this.... Does anyone on this list have some experience or practical experience in this area? If we only stick to streaming broadcast of hymns sung during live Roman Catholic Church services (and we do not play any other pre-recorded music before during or after services) are we within our rights to broadcast the services through web streaming without having to pay for additional copyright protection? If not and we should purchase a rights license, does anyone have recommendations for a rights license service provider where the service is reputable, the costs are reasonable and the reporting isn't to a point that it requires a lot of weekly work? Thanks in advance for any input. Kind Regards, John Schroth -- Media Transfer Service, LLC High Quality Conversion Of: Video - Audio - Motion Picture - Still Image Phone: 585-248-4908 Web: www.mediatransferservice.com Find out what's new at MTS: http://www.mediatransferservice.com/whats%20new.htm