KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Paul Burton, video operator for the Parkway House of Prayer, uses his computer to cue words for an upcoming song. More and more churches are forsaking hymnals in favor of projecting the words on a screen to help the congregation sing. The improving technology and churches' acumen have led to more elaborate presentations.

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The well-worn hymnal isn't trendy anymore and is being rapidly replaced in Roanoke and elsewhere by singalong visual productions that project words on screens or church walls. But beware.

Those old hymnals usually contain something that the song-filled software churches purchase to use with their computer-connected displays of lyrics occasionally might not: the copyrights that grant legal permission to sing those particular hymns.

Some companies serve as clearinghouses for software purchasers and for fees that vary with the size of the congregation, they offer blanket copyright permission so the churches don't have to contact every publisher or composer individually. For example, Christian Copyright Licensing International, based in Portland, Ore., charges $49 a year for churches with membership up to 24 people. "For a smaller church, maybe that's all they want," said Paul Herman, the company's marketing director.

For churches with 200,000-plus members, CCLI's fee is $4,260.

Shenandoah Baptist Church in Northeast Roanoke is among CCLI's longtime customers, said Terry Tankersley, music director. "You can't just throw words up on a screen without checking to see if you have permission to use them."

He occasionally sends out memos to church staffers and volunteers to make sure they have cleared the copyright requirement, especially before using new songs. "If it's a new song, you need to check and see if you have permission from that publisher." Copyright clearance from a publisher usually covers all its songs, including new ones.

With clearinghouse services such as CCLI, Tankersley said, "You pay the annual fee and you know a new song is covered automatically."

Congregation members can tell if the copyright permission has been obtained by carefully reading the fine print at the end of a song. At the end of the last verse there should be brief copyright information, or at least an acknowledgement that CCLI or some other clearinghouse has approved the use of those lyrics, Tankersley said.

The risk for churches starts before the display of the words or the singing: It's in how the words were obtained, known as the "reproduction." For example, lyrics to hymns and secular songs are widely available on the Internet. But if a church volunteer or music director were to simply copy hymn lyrics from a Web site on his or her computer and print those for projection, that's reproduction and illegal without permission, Herman said.

But one clearinghouse might not cover all the songs a congregation wants to sing. That's the case at St. John's Lutheran Church in Southwest Roanoke, which subscribes to CCLI and to another copyright clearinghouse, OneLicense.net in Chicago.

Kim Mucha, St. John's minister of contemporary worship, said the only hymns you can be sure are in the public domain, and thus safe from potential copyright infringements, "are the really old ones you see in a hymnal" -- those that are mainly from past centuries.