There are practical and ethical problems with using copyright
law to restrict the copying and distribution of the Bible and other
Christian texts, study materials, and music. This mode of financing is
still predominant among Bible publishers. However, I am much more
optimistic now than I was when I first started writing about this issue
in 2008. There have been a lot of positive developments, and I believe
that the momentum in Bible punishment is behind permissively-licensed
texts. This is good for everyone.
Our story begins with the venerable NET Bible, which has actually
been around for quite a while. The NET's licensing terms are somewhat
restrictive and confusing, but were nonetheless a far sight more
permissive than anything else available at the time of its release. The
NET Bible was a bold and deliberate step in the right direction, and it
is no accident that it coincided with the rise of the world wide web.
From the preface:
We don’t like the copyright notice on the second page of the NET
Bible, but we don’t yet know the best way to fix it. The reason for
this dilemma is that we stand at the beginning of a new era made
possible by the Internet. New approaches to ministry, publishing,
distribution, and collaboration are made possible by the Internet.
When the first Bibles and books began to be printed rather than copied
by hand, new issues emerged (plagiarism, author’s rights, freedom of
the press versus censorship, copyright laws, etc.). It is now time to
recognize that the copyright and permissions conventions carried over
from printed books must now be upgraded for the Internet age.
I believe it is fair to say that since the time that preface was
written, the new era of online copyright licenses pined for has come
about. There is a lot more infrastructure to support freely-licensed
works in the internet age.
While the NET Bible got the ball rolling, other Bible resources have
been building momentum of late. Logos Bible Software has published the
Lexham English Bible and the Society of Biblical Literature Greek
New Testament (SBLGNT) under fairly permissive licenses. I do have
some minor gripes about these licenses, but I find the SBLGNT
development particularly encouraging given the frustrating history of
copyright issues surrounding modern eclectic editions of the Greek New
Testament.
Even in cases where texts have a more traditional licenses (and by
traditional I mean "similar to the NIV") there have been positive
developments. Many publishers are permitting or creating their own
excellent web interfaces to their texts, so that anyone with an internet
connection can read them on demand. Furthermore some have created public
APIs, making it so their texts can be integrated into third-party
applications. The ESV is a pioneer in this regard.
Yes, now is an exciting time for Christianity and Copyright, but there
is still more progress to be made. On the whole, I'd like to see these
efforts toward more permissive licensing and accessibility become more
unified and standardized. To that end I have previously suggested that
content publishers ought to use the already-established Creative
Commons suite of licenses. There is no point in recreating the wheel,
and I am skeptical that the terms of all these custom licenses are truly
necessary. Using a standard group of easily-understood licenses makes it
easier for people to understand how they can make use of the work.
In the realm of online applications and interoperability, I'd like to
see more moves toward a standard data interchange format as well as a
common API for accessing Bible data on the web. This will make
newly-liberated texts easier to make use of in modern technologies. Work
is already being done on this front, and I believe it will come to
fruition.
Additionally I would like to see this spirit of openness spread to other
works of Christian scholarship and culture. Worship music, academic
texts, journal articles, devotionals, and the like should be freely
licensed just like the Bible. It it is not a big stretch to apply the
same arguments I put forth concerning the scriptures to other matters of
Christian culture.
I am quite optimistic about Christianity and Copyright. The current
legacy of restrictive copyrights results mostly from publisher-financed
translation and fear of change. Christians intrinsically agree that the
Bible should be freely-licensed. The only reason restriction has been
tolerated is to raise funds, but that is no longer necessary. We are at
a temporary impasse, and I think the age of limited quotation to 250
verses will be only a brief memory in the history of the church.
There is yet a lot of work to do. Anyone can help out, by petitioning
copyright holders to change their licenses, by licensing their own work
permissively, and by participating in projects which make sharing of the
scriptures easier. By creating new works and pressuring the rights
holders of existing works to change their stance, it will not be long
until there is a very fertile ecosystem of freely-licensed Bibles and
other Christian works. That is a time to which I am looking forward.