Biblical Copyrights Are Weird

The other day, I accidentally clicked on the copyright note at the bottom of a NIV translation. That proved to be a disappointing mistake. As it just so happens, the NIV translation of the Bible is copyrighted. You probably already knew this, but I didn’t because I’m evidently illiterate. The copyright has been there my whole life.

I didn’t run into it previously because there’s a gratis use license that allows you to use the NIV with no written permission requests under certain conditions. The main conditions are quoting no more than 500 verses total within the work in question, scripture must make up 25% or less of the work, scripture does not account for an entire book of the Bible, and all scripture must be properly cited.

In my opinion, this is a steaming, heaping load of *********. Let me explain why. Let’s say I write a book in English because my German is speaking only, and I can’t use Spanish verbs. I release the book with all rights reserved. Then let’s say some strapping young lad comes along and decides to translate the whole book into German and start selling it without sending me so much as a dime. That seems like a load of crap if you ask me.

How about another example? Let’s say that I get my hands on an old Russian classic from the last days of Catherine the Great’s reign. It’s a public domain work because it’s about 227 years old. I then proceed to translate it into English and copyright my translation of it. I then have the audacity to forbid people from using the translation I made by copying a work I didn’t write myself.

It’s kind of ridiculous. Making matters worse is the fact that the Bible was written thousands of years ago by around 40 different authors. At some point, you can’t copy someone’s homework and call it your own. You especially shouldn’t do this when you’re copying God’s homework.

Now I know that you’re all going to come back and say that the translators and Bible scholars do it as a job and they deserve to get paid for their work. To that, all I have to say is have fun explaining to God why you were profiting off the book he wrote. Especially when it wasn’t written for profit by the original authors and when the source translations were paid for by the early Christian church.

In conclusion, it’s one thing to copyright something you made up yourself. It’s another thing to copyright something you copied from someone else. It’s a lot like the good old, “You can copy my homework but make sure you change it a little bit, so we don’t get caught,” that we all remember from high school. So, at any rate, I guess I will be spending a lot more time with the KJV, the ASV, the WEB, and the PDV.