Is it legal to record copyrighted music for playback in worship?

Questions

Our church has MIDI recording capabilities on the organ and also has a Clavinova with a disk drive. I have multiple disks on which I have recorded pieces either to save the registrations, to use for emergency "snow days," music I have recorded to play while I go to the Communion rail, or anthem accompaniments that I have recorded so I can conduct. Could you make a comment about this "electronic storage" and the copyright law?

I also have purchased a digital voice recorder. Last week,the accompanist was having trouble with the counting in the anthem. I recorded two pages of the anthem at home and e-mailed the audio file to her for home practice. Are these types of usage illegal?

I'm guessing from all the other e-mails that the answer is probably "yes," but it actually never crossed my mind until these recent discussions.

Questions Summarized

1. Is it legal to record copyrighted music for playback in worship for occasions such as snow days or while the musician takes Communion?
2. Is it legal to record my own accompaniments of solo or choir pieces for accompanying while the choir sings in worship?
3. Is it legal to record pieces or portions of pieces and give them to the accompanist for study or imitation?

Responses to Summary Questions:

1. The law prohibits the making of tapes, CDs, tracks, MIDI sound files, and so on to be used to accompany soloists, choir, or congregation in worship, even for such good reasons as snow days and to free up the accompanist to take Holy Communion. To do this legally, you need to acquire a mechanical license from Harry Fox Agency or permission from the copyright holder.
2. Same response as no. 1.
3. Same response as no. 1.

The problem here is that despite the very good reasons for your needing to make these recordings, the law makes no allowance for them. If the music belongs to someone else, the law requires you to secure permission or the appropriate license to make copies or recordings. It puts the burden squarely on the musician or church to do it legally. Neither the copyright holder nor the government has any responsibility for granting exceptions to the law or for making it easy for us to obey the law.

Another aspect to this question is the role played by the manufacturers of the technology that makes it so easy for us to make these illegal copies and recordings. Some years ago there was a great debate between the interests of the copyright holders (aided by publishers, authors, composers, and performance rights societies such as ASCAP and BMI) and the companies that manufactured VCRs, tape recorders, and the then new digital devices. The position of the manufacturers was that "WE don't make the copies. WE don't break the law. WE don't steal the intellectual property — the guilty parties are those who make the copies illegally; and THEY are the ones you should be going after. (That would include a lot of church musicians.) The argument of the copyright holders was that the manufacturers have made it so easy to steal their property and deny them income that they should bear some of the responsibility; besides, it's impractical to expect the copyright holders to hunt down every offending church musician and take legal action to recover financial losses. The outcome of that legal dispute was that a portion of the cost of every video and sound recording device (the recorder, the tape, and the disc) goes to a fund that is ultimately shared by copyright holders. I'm not enough of an expert to explain how this works, however. This decision also was cited as precedent in the more recent case involving Napster and Internet music file sharing, in which millions of users were uploading and downloading music files illegally at no cost, with millions of dollars in losses being borne by the copyright holders. Our use of MIDI, making our own accompaniment tapes, and using equipment like Yamaha Clavinovas is not much different from putting a copyrighted hymn on the photocopy machine or into a PowerPoint slide for use in worship without asking permission. The technology is a wonderful boon to our work, but it does not excuse us from the provisions of the law.