Open almost any modern English Bible at its first pages and you will find a copyright notice, often followed by a paragraph of permissions: how many verses may be quoted without asking, what credit line must be used, and whom to write to for anything more. Readers are sometimes surprised. The Hebrew and Greek texts are ancient, and the Bible is meant to be read and shared. How can anyone own it?

The short answer is that nobody owns the Bible, but someone owns each translation of it. This article explains how that works, why sponsors and publishers keep their rights, and why the arrangement has critics.

In most countries, copyright arises automatically when someone creates an original work. No registration is needed, and under the Berne Convention, which most countries have joined, the protection is recognised internationally. The term is long: commonly the author’s life plus seventy years, and in the United States ninety-five years from publication for works made by employees or commissioned as “works made for hire,” a category that can include translations commissioned by a sponsoring body.

The ancient texts themselves are not protected. Isaiah and Paul are far beyond any copyright term. But a translation is a new work. Every English sentence in it reflects choices of words, order and style that the translators made, and the law protects that expression. So does it protect the editorial work in modern editions of the original-language texts: a critical Greek New Testament, whose editors chose among manuscript readings and wrote an apparatus, can be copyrighted even though every word in it is ancient (see How textual criticism works).

Copyright protects wording, not ideas or facts. A translation’s interpretation of a verse can be adopted by anyone; its exact sentences cannot be reproduced at length without permission.

This is not new

Control over the English Bible is older than modern copyright. For centuries the printing of the King James Version in England was a royal privilege, and in the United Kingdom it still is (see Who owns the King James Version?). When the American Standard Version appeared in 1901, its publisher, Thomas Nelson & Sons, registered its copyright; Christianity Today has described it as the first Bible translation copyrighted in the United States. That copyright has long since expired. The Revised Standard Version of 1952 was copyrighted by the body that sponsored it, which became the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Copyright has been the normal condition of new English Bibles for more than a century.

Why sponsors keep their rights

Integrity of the text. The reason publishers give most often is control over what appears under a translation’s name. If anyone could print an altered text and call it the NIV or the ESV, readers could not trust that a Bible with that name says what the translators wrote. Copyright, together with trademark protection of translation names, lets the owner refuse altered or careless editions. Some open translations reach the same goal by other means. The World English Bible is in the public domain, and its preface asks only that users “maintain the integrity of God’s Word before God, and reserve the name ‘World English Bible’ for faithful copies of this translation.”

Paying for the work. A major translation takes years of work by dozens of scholars, as well as stylists, reviewers and editors, and it is revised every decade or two (see How a modern translation is made). Copyright gives sponsors a way to recover those costs from the sale of printed Bibles, apps and licences, rather than relying entirely on donations.

Funding other work. For several translations, licence income supports wider ministry. Biblica, formerly the International Bible Society, holds the copyright of the NIV and licenses it to commercial publishers, Zondervan (part of HarperCollins Christian Publishing) in North America and Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom. Zondervan and Biblica have said that proceeds from NIV sales help fund Biblica’s translation work in other languages. The Lockman Foundation, a non-profit that owns the NASB and the Amplified Bible, funds its work through licensing. Crossway, which owns the ESV, is itself a not-for-profit publishing ministry. The NRSV’s copyright is held by the National Council of Churches, which licenses it to many publishers.

The publishing model

The usual arrangement separates the owner of a translation from the publishers who sell it. The owner, often a non-profit foundation or church body, keeps the copyright and commissions revisions. Publishers pay for the right to produce editions: study Bibles, journalling Bibles, children’s Bibles, large print, audio, and editions in every binding. Royalties flow back to the owner. A translation’s popularity therefore matters financially, and so does how widely it is available in apps and online.

Digital distribution follows the same pattern. Websites and apps license texts from their owners. Bible Gateway, for example, displays translations under licence from their publishers. Services such as API.Bible offer developers access to many copyrighted translations, free for some non-commercial uses and for monthly fees for others, while some translations are not offered for commercial use at all. Terms vary by translation and change over time.

What you may quote without asking

Most owners grant a general permission to quote limited amounts without writing to them, provided a credit line is included. These general permissions differ from translation to translation and have changed over the years. At the time of writing they included:

  • NIV (Biblica). Up to 500 verses without written permission, provided the verses do not amount to a complete book of the Bible and do not make up 25 percent or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted.
  • ESV (Crossway). Up to 500 verses, provided they do not amount to more than half of any one book and do not make up 25 percent or more of the new work. Earlier ESV editions printed a more generous 1,000-verse allowance. Crossway’s terms also require permission for quotation in commentaries and other biblical reference works.
  • NASB (Lockman Foundation). Older NASB editions allowed 500 verses and 25 percent of the work; the Foundation’s more recent terms allow up to 1,000 verses, provided they do not make up a complete book or more than half of the work.
  • NET Bible (Biblical Studies Press). Generous free use for personal study, teaching and non-commercial ministry, under what its publishers call a “ministry first” policy, with commercial publication requiring a licence.

Larger uses, such as printing a whole Gospel, a full Bible in an app, or a commentary that quotes the entire text, require a licence, which may involve a fee. Anyone planning such a use should read the owner’s current terms rather than rely on a summary, because they change.

The effects are felt most sharply outside English. Many translations into minority languages are made by drawing on a translation in a major “gateway” language such as English, French, Swahili or Portuguese, together with the translators’ notes and helps that come with it. If those source texts are copyrighted, a translation team or a local church may need permission, and sometimes payment, before it can adapt them. A translation into a related language may count legally as a derivative work.

In a 2016 Christianity Today report on the question, the president of Pioneer Bible Translators called copyright “one of the greatest remaining challenges we have.” Even the finished translations raise questions. A minority-language Bible is usually copyrighted by the Bible society or agency that published it, which may limit how local churches can print, record or put it online. Many agencies now license such translations freely through shared digital libraries, but the permissions still have to be managed.

The criticism

Critics of the copyright model make several arguments:

  • The text belongs to the church. Many argue that Scripture, and the gifts of the scholars who translate it, should not be fenced off. Tim Jore, an advocate of open-licensed resources for Bible translation who has worked with Wycliffe Associates and unfoldingWord, made this case at length in The Christian Commons, arguing that legal restrictions keep discipleship resources from the churches that need them most.
  • Donors have often paid already. Much translation work is funded by gifts. Critics ask why the results should then be sold back to the people the gifts were meant to serve.
  • Permissions slow everything down. App makers, teachers, recording projects and translators lose time negotiating licences, and some projects are abandoned.
  • Integrity can be protected in other ways. Trademarks, faithful-copy requests and published checksums can protect a translation’s name without restricting its text.

Defenders reply that without a revenue model, revisions would not be funded and quality would suffer; that copyright prevents distorted editions; that most owners already permit generous free quotation; and that many publishers give licences freely for ministry use in poorer countries. Publishers quoted in the same Christianity Today report defended their practice and disputed parts of the critics’ account.

A changing landscape

The picture is changing. Several translations have been released into the public domain or under open licences, and some of the largest Bible agencies have released texts in major languages under Creative Commons licences. Those developments are described in Public domain and open Bibles.

Open Word Bible is one of the projects that chose differently. Its translation, notes and data are dedicated to the public domain under CC0, so that anyone may quote, print, adapt or translate them without asking (see Why another Bible translation?). It translates from openly licensed and public-domain source texts, the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, and uses copyrighted translations only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording. Its drafts are AI-assisted and stay unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them. The choice has a cost: there is no licence income to pay for the work.

Sources

  • Biblica. “Permissions” (NIV quotation guidelines). biblica.com.
  • Crossway. “Permissions Requests” (ESV quotation guidelines). crossway.org.
  • The Lockman Foundation. “Permission to Quote: Copyright and Trademark Information.” lockman.org.
  • Biblical Studies Press. “NET Bible Copyright” and “Ministry First” statement. netbible.com.
  • Jore, Tim. The Christian Commons: Ending the Spiritual Famine of the Global Church.
  • “Releasing God’s Word: Do Copyrights Help or Hurt Bible Translation?” Christianity Today, July/August 2016.
  • Griffin, Jesse A., and Todd L. Price. “Unrestricted Original Language Resources.” HIPHIL Novum 5, no. 2 (2019): 86–96.
  • World English Bible. Preface. eBible.org.
  • This article quotes no copyrighted Bible text; the quotation from the World English Bible’s preface is public domain.