Copyright in recordings of the type included in this collection typically includes two sets of rights: 1) rights in the sound recording, and 2) rights in the underlying musical composition. Based on when and where these sound recordings were created, we believe these sound recordings are protected by U.S. Copyright Law under § 1401 et seq. of Title 17 of the U.S. Code (amended 2018). We have additionally assessed the copyright status of the musical compositions represented in these sound recordings. For compositions, we focused our copyright status research in three databases: BMI, ASCAP, and CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International), searching each tune in the databases. Songs we could not locate in these databases have, we believe "no known copyright" and are labeled as such in the local rights note field. For those songs that appeared in one or more of the databases, we searched HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Internet Archive for printed works published before 1923 that included those songs. When we found printed sources that matched the pre-1923 criterion, we tagged the tune as being in the public domain in the local rights note field, and noted copyright databases in which it appeared. If we were not able to find any pre-1923 published material for a tune, then we tagged the tunes as a potentially copyrighted work for which we performed further due diligence. Users of the collection should bear in mind that, while we have determined the digitized material can be presented here under terms of Fair Use, any commercial further use of the recordings would require further independent assessment by the user. When we use the term “no copyright – US” we use it as defined by RightStatements.org at https://rightsstatements.org/page/NoC-US/1.0/?language=en. When we use the term “no known copyright” we use it as defined by RightsStatements.org at https://rightsstatements.org/page/NKC/1.0/?language=en
For more information about the Library's general policies, visit the Rubenstein Library's guide on citations, permissions, and copyright.
