Staying legal with copyrights and licenses has always been a challenge. Luckily, with blanket licenses like the Rehearsal License by CCLI, and the Performance License by Christian Copyright Solutions, you pay one fee and get licenses for tons of songs. Those licenses cover pretty specific usage though. Just because you have a license to give rehearsal audio to your team doesn't mean you have a license to distribute purchased chord charts to them.
If you use chord charts by SongSelect, they're covered for your whole team, but if you get music from other sources, you have to make sure you have licenses for each person. PraiseCharts includes 5 licenses with most purchases, but if you need more than that, or you get your printed music from another source that doesn't include multiple licenses, you've got the tough job of keeping track of each license. That's why we're excited to announce a great new way to make tracking individual file licenses much easier!
File Activity
Did you know that Planning Center has always tracked all activity for each file? You can go to where you uploaded any file, click the pencil, and see the entire history of that file's activity including uploads, downloads, and views (streams). If you want to know whether someone has accessed their music to rehearse it, just check out the Access Log for that file.
Adding Licenses
Now we've added a Licensing section to every file that does two things. It keeps a cumulative tally of how many individual people have ever accessed that file, and it allows you to input how many licenses you have for it. Based on cutting-edge mathematics, we can deduce the number of licenses remaining or exceeded based on these two numbers using a revolutionary process known as "subtraction." This allows you to see how many licenses you have remaining.
If your file is covered by a blanket license or doesn't need a license, you can just leave the license number blank. You'll still see the total number of people who have accessed the file, but licenses won't be tracked. If you do enter a number of licenses, you will also be set as the License Administrator for that file, though you can change that to anyone else who is a part of your PCO Services account.
License Update Emails
Every Monday, any License Administrators who have reached or exceeded their licenses will get an email listing all the overdrawn files. To prevent getting the email in the future, obtain new licenses from wherever you got the files, and update the number of licenses you have in PCO Services.
The Attachments Page
To help you manage many files at once, you can visit the Attachments page. In fact, when you click the link in the License Emails, it will take you to the Attachments page. The page itself has been a part of PCO Services for a long time, but only Organization Administrators could get to it. To make it great for license administration, we've redesigned it and now allow anyone with Editor permissions to get to it.
The Attachments Page lists every file in your entire account, showing where it is attached, the license details, and the date it was created. Click any file name to edit it on the Attachments page or click the text in the "Attached To" column to go to the page where that file is attached.
The Licenses filter on the left lets you see all files, files with overdrawn licenses, or files that aren't tracking licenses (because a number isn't entered into the license field). You can also filter to files belonging to a specific License Administrator.
Permissions
Though more people can get to the Attachments page than before, the important thing to know is each person still only has access to files they are allowed to edit. For example, a person can have Editor permission for "Sunday Services" but only Viewer permission for "High School." Because Editors can upload files, they have access to the Attachments page. However, even though they will see all files on the Attachments page, if they try to edit or delete a file that is part of the "High School" Service Type, they'll see a popup alerting them that they don't have access to that particular file.
Coming Soon
We hope tracking file licenses is much easier for you using this new feature, but if you have questions on copyright laws and licensing, contact CCLI or Christian Copyright Solutions. Oh, and schedule a family meeting to get ready for our next feature announcement in the next week or two! To stay up on all the latest Planning Center news, follow PlanningCenter on Facebook or Twitter.