Clearing Rights Before You Broadcast or Screen: a Volunteer Media Checklist

Rights are the invisible line item of community media. A station that never misses a transmitter payment can still stumble on the licenses its schedule actually requires, and the same surprise awaits a film society projecting classics in a library basement. The checklist below is the one both kinds of volunteer groups end up writing for themselves.

What does a low-power station clear before it goes on air?

An LPFM station broadcasting music to the public needs performance licenses covering the songs it plays, typically the umbrella agreements sold by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, each offering a small-broadcaster tier priced far below commercial rates; for the stream or podcast companion, sound-recording rights enter through SoundExchange. Underwriting language, station identifications and public file duties are license conditions rather than rights purchases, but they sit on the same checklist because forgetting them costs the same way. Spoken-word programming recorded in house, the interviews and readings at the heart of community radio, carries the simplest rights story of all: consent of the speaker and ownership of the recording, exactly the inventory the podcast workshop builds its feed from. The same blanket-license logic governs a community film night: the American reference notebook kept for volunteer film societies explains when a public performance license is needed and what the umbrella contracts that cover repertory houses include, and its page on public performance rights is the plainest reading of that rule a volunteer board will find.

How does the same logic apply to a community film night?

A film shown to a gathered audience is a public performance under the same copyright statute that governs broadcast, regardless of whether tickets are sold or admission is free. The copyright statute’s own text makes the definition plain, and the practical consequence is the same one a music director learns: a blanket license exists, it is cheaper than the fines, and it is bought once a year rather than negotiated per screening. One recurring payment, one folder of paperwork, and the programming stops being a legal guess.

Where can a volunteer board read a plain account of screening rights?

Volunteers rarely have to negotiate any of this alone. Community broadcasters share rate cards and horror stories freely, the performing rights organizations publish their small-station tiers on request, and the film-society world maintains the same folk knowledge through its notebooks and umbrella contracts. The pattern in every version is identical: a named volunteer owns the rights page, renewals sit on the calendar beside the license renewal, and the board sees the total once a year as a line item, not a surprise. It is also the honest answer to give an underwriter or a venue manager who asks whether the station’s music or the society’s screening is cleared: the file exists, the license is current, and the answer takes one page rather than a scramble. The station that treats rights as routine paperwork frees its programming meeting to argue about content, which is the argument the volunteers actually joined for.

The clean habit is a rights page in the station’s own operations binder, written once and updated at renewal: which licenses are held, when they expire, what each covers and what it does not. A film society’s checklist maps neatly onto a radio station’s: title or song, venue or channel, audience type, license held. Groups starting from zero should read the exemptions honestly too; Section 110 carves out narrow cases such as face-to-face teaching, and neither a ticketed film night nor a broadcast schedule qualifies. The volunteer who keeps this page current is doing the same job as the engineer who keeps the channel protections documented: invisible work that keeps the visible work legal. Community media runs on permissions quietly renewed, and a checklist is how a two-person board keeps them all in view.

The checklist’s real product is confidence. A volunteer who can answer the rights question in one sentence programs boldly instead of timidly, and a station that programs boldly sounds like a service rather than a hobby.