The Honor Academy website recently posted an article about SOPA titled, “Piracy is a Sin…Are You Involved?” It states:
Piracy is considered stealing…As Christians, are we sensitive to the extent of piracy? Do we justify piracy by not labeling our habits as piracy? Most Christians consider selling burned movies and CDs as piracy. However, when it comes to downloading free, pirated music and videos for personal entertainment, some Christians consider it acceptable. Before feature films, we watch piracy previews and copyright warnings. We scan over this info and think of all the stereotyped “thieves” out there. What if we scanned over these warnings and felt convicted for ourselves?
…we need to delete our pirated music and throw away our pirated movies. Why? Because our good and perfect Father commanded us to and nothing he commands is ever against us, but always for us. It is for our own good that we avoid steeling (sic) and instead, trust God to meet our every need.
This is unbelievable considering that Teen Mania regularly pirates music! For example, many of their CCM produced videos use copyrighted music. As far as I know, they are not paying for that privilege the same way that any legitimate television production company would (Teen Mania, feel free to disprove that!) Many ESOAL videos use multiple Christian songs that former CMM members confirm Teen Mania did not pay for.
(Note the irony of producing videos about honor and integrity using stolen music.)
In addition, Ron Luce himself has multiple pirated movies in his home! Or as Ron happily calls them at 1:02 “knock-off videos.”
Bonus points if you notice that Ron’s son is singing evil secular music in the background. (Most popular culture is “raping virgin America on the sidewalk” but Maroon 5 seems to have the Ron Luce stamp of approval.)
Teen Mania continually preaches a set of strict rules to teenagers – a set of rules they do not apply to themselves.
UPDATE: Commenter “Forever, Char” identifies herself as a CMM intern and confirms that Teen Mania DOES NOT pay to license music for its videos and that they do not believe they need to because they are a non-profit. She goes on to say that Teen Mania “checks and REchecks that they’re being legal with all their stuff (I would know, it was my job as an intern with CCM).” Its unfortunate that they did not train her correctly for her job considering that she is paying a lot of money to learn how to work in the television and film industry. Regardless of what Teen Mania told her, non-profits are not exempt from copyright rules. Doug Rittenhouse, head of CMM, knows better.
As someone with a degree in television production and several years spent working in the television industry, I can say that if I EVER used a piece of copyright music without licensing it, I would have been in very hot water.