We believe the rights of writers and performers need to be respected; all songs and other intellectual property shared on the GriffinEd website, YouTube channel, or other means of distribution remain the property of their copyright holders. With that in mind…

Our work is made available for your use (with some exceptions, please see below) through a liberally applied Creative Commons license. In practice this means that you are welcome (with attribution) to play or sing our songs in public; print out lyrics for yourself, friends, or students; make a music video and post it online; use our work as part of a school project; or pretty much whatever else you like as long as you’re not making money from it. If you want to sell something involving our work (i.e. paid performances, videos with advertising, using our songs on an album, etc.) we need to talk. If you’re not sure, please contact Tim and we’ll work something out. Please let us know what you are doing with our music; we love to see your projects!

A note about the use of other people’s melodies for some songs: students in our writing workshops usually write their own lyrics to existing tunes, and some of our submitted music from contributing writers is also written to existing tunes. Some of those tunes are under copyright protection, which creates a potential ethical and legal dilemma. United States copyright law makes allowances for the use of an existing tune for purposes of satire, parody, education, etc. but in practice the law can be a little ambiguous. More importantly, we want to honor the hard work of people who create the songs we love, so we prefer to err on the side of a copyright holder’s rights. If you are the rightful owner of a song and you don’t like the way we are using it, please contact us and we will remove it posthaste unless we can reach some kind of agreement.