The Recovering Choir Director

The USCCB has made available the final ICEL translation of much of the Ordinary of the Mass on their website in PDF format, along with a letter from the Congregation of Divine Worship signed by Cardinal Arinze and Archbishop Ranjith. (Fr. Zuhlsdorf has commented on this letter on his site.) Readers who have viewed the PDF will have noticed the clear copyright notice at the top of each page, of which the existence, past enforcement (the 1970s version of ICEL’s translations), and consequences of its future enforcement have been the subject of considerable discussion on the NLM blog (here, here and here).

The topics of royalties, textual integrity, and Creative Commons were brought up in the comment box, and so this post will examine Creative Commons (from this layman’s point of view) and which licenses lCEL may employ to 1) ensure the integrity of the translation and 2) minimize the legal and economic (and perhaps psychological*) barriers to entry faced by composers and minor publishing houses outside of the good graces of the Liturgical Industrial Complex.

Creative Commons (CC), as an NLM commenter rightly noted, does not seek to eliminate copyright, but is based on copyright. (CC FAQ 1.3) If ICEL were to place their new English translation of the Mass under some flavor of Creative Commons license, they do not revoke their copyright; they retain it. However, it would make clearer to composers exactly what their rights and responsibilities are in terms of setting the texts to music.

Looking at the conditions that a Creative Commons license may bind, it seems that the most liberal permissions that a copyright holder like ICEL can give is via the CC-Attribution License. This allows the composer to appropriate the work as he sees fit, in part or in whole, provided the proper attribution is made.

A bit more restrictive permission, for the purposes of ICEL, may be the CC-Attribution No Derivatives License, which, for the sake of composers, should only apply to the text in its entirety - composers may not alter the texts or word order, although the restriction on line breaks, which apparently can be copyrighted, would properly be waived.

Both of the above options allow for commercial, royalty-free redistribution. However, there is one more option that seems to be closest to ICEL’s intent - both economically and for the sake of their work’s integrity. This is the CC-Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License, where a composer or publisher would have to ask permission from ICEL to sell a work based on their translation. Once again, the license should apply only to the texts to ensure their integrity. However, a major difference between this and the “All Rights Reserved” extreme is that composers would not need to ask ICEL’s permission to publish, for free, Mass settings of their creation; the permission is already granted in the license.

There are other licenses that Creative Commons provides, but these three are the ones that caught my attention as possible candidates for ICEL should they choose to place their translation of the Mass Ordinary under such a license.

If it wasn’t already obvious from the post, I am not a lawyer, so my explanations may have served to obfuscate rather than clarify certain details - maybe I’d be a ‘good lawyer?’ - but hopefully this will have opened some eyes to the possibilities that can be unleashed under a Creative Commons license while respecting the underlying registered copyright if it exists, as it does in the case of ICEL.

Anyone with better explanations or questions regarding the existing licenses are welcome to share them in the comment box.

*Update: For an example of a psychological barrier to entry, try wrapping your mind around the excerpts of the ICEL contract provided by Noel Jones on the MusicaSacra forum.