Carrie Underwood Discussion

I fully expect this topic to be removed, but the matter I bring to this community is important to me.

My mother passed away on January 19th of this year from cancer. She encountered Carrie's "Jesus Take The Wheel" song shortly before her death and shared her appreciation of the song with us late last year. She was touched by the song and it very much represented where she was at with things at the time. The concept of "Jesus taking the wheel" could not be more relevant for her. As would be natural, we chose this very appropriate song to play at her memorial service. It was a beautiful event...and one that I would like to share with others from my family that weren't able to make it to the service.

The problem is, as I try to upload the very unique and personally important service to YouTube, the video has been flagged by YouTube as copyright infringement because we played the song 45 minutes into the service. There's 65 minutes of her memorial service that has nothing to do with Carrie, but the entire audio track of our video has been muted because 45 minutes into the service, we took 5 minutes to play a slideshow of her photo's with this song as the backdrop. I could remove this track, yes, but I feel the internet has gone too far in this case. And thus my appeal to her community.

I can't even begin to state the absolute frustration I have with a "copyright infringement" that, in no uncertain terms, comes from our creator. You can't copyright that...your life, your ability, your inspiration. I get it...I've bought the album and I realize I have no entitlement by that reason, but really? I can't share 65 minutes of entirely unique, personally copyrighted material because we chose to include 5 minutes of inspirational music from Carrie? I just want to share the event with family. That's it. I'm not in this for a buck, I don't want to break a law...but music can say so much that we often times don't have the words to say.

I'm sorry to vent, but if there's a way I can get personal permission to use this song - in purely a personal purpose for the memorial service, it would mean the world to me. I don't even know how to fight a battle between Google and Carrie Underwood...I just want to share her moment, in it's entirety, to a few people who care about my mom. Is there anything that can be done or is this just the world we live in these days? Have we really gotten to the point where a song about Jesus is worth every dollar we can milk from it? From what I understand, I only need acknowledgement of fair use and/or permission to use the song for this purpose. Can anything be done without having to purchase royalties or removing the song from the video?

Thanks for your time.

Jeff