Blog Power ?

ICEL has finally decided that it will not charge royalties on any music downloads, providing that the source is acknowledged.

I found this statement on the New Liturgical Movement site slightly confusing, until I realised that it was a reference to written music (along with the texts of the new translation of the Mass!)

That is very good news indeed.

The cloud attached to this silver lining is that ICEL wants all copies of music for the new translation removed from the blogosphere until the texts are ready for release, and ALL music publishers are ready to go with it. ICEL will make an announcement when this happens. How long will we have to wait? Well, how long is a piece of string?

I'm feeling ever so slightly cynical this evening... and so I am probably being totally uncharitable in wondering if this is rather a neat bit of damage limitation: the blogs had been positively scathing in their condemnation of ICEL's ridiculous stance, and more and more of the text was finding its way to the blogosphere despite the threats of copyright legislation being brought to bear; furthermore, the NLM site has now taken down all the music it had put up already, in order to comply with ICEL's wishes...

No... I shall be charitable and focus on the silver lining: once the text is approved and finalised, it will be free of royalty charges...

eventually...