Bibles and copyright

Godisawesome

I have downloaded the NKJV, NIV, NASB, MSG, ESV, CEV and AMP bibles off the Open Song website to import into OpenLP. I am a bit confused about all the copyright conditions and which bibles I can use in a church service. Can anybody enlighten me as to which versions can be used? As some seem to have no restrictions, others are restricted to how many verses can be used (but not sure if it means the verses used in one particular service or combined over all services the bible is used in), then to confuse it even more some seem to need permission to use them at all. Thanks in advance, Paul

alisonken1

The bibles that are available as download when you first install OpenLP (KJV, ASV) can be used at any time - they're out of copyright. Any other bible you have to look at the copyright date (pretty much any bible that the copyright is 120 years old is now public domain) and/or the copyright license that they have. As a rule of thumb, the one exception would be if your church has a bible for everyone in the church, then it can be used since you already purchased a copy for everyone that would be seeing it projected. For example, our church has the NIV bible in the pews (plus a whole bunch of spares), so we can use the NIV bible in OpenLP in addition to the KJV and the ASV.

Godisawesome

@alisonken1 thank you for your reply, that would rule out been able to use anything but the KJV and ASV, as we just use the projector to display scriptures on. Currently they use Songbeamer but we are migrating over to OpenLP. I am only looking at alternative versions because the development version branch of OpenLP I'm testing has a problem with some bible verses and displays them incorrectly if there are word surrounded by square brackets then it thinks they are chords in a song, which changes how they are displayed. Ahh well, back to the drawing board as they say :-)

Jinju Church

NET Bible is free to use per this page. http://netbible.com/net-bible-copyright

Godisawesome

@"Jinju Church" thank you for that. I will have a look into that. 

DouglasM

Modern bible publishers are doing the same evil that the Vatican and the Roman Catholic church did in the medieval times, they hold back the word of God for a fee, they act as unholy gatekeepers of God's word, these unholy greedy men and women will answer to God for this unholy evil and greed. Believers in The Lord Yeshua/Jesus The Messiah should not have to pay anyone or ask anyone permission to freely download a complete copy of the word of God to our computers, tablets and smart phones, and we should also have the right to print our own Bibles if we have access to a printer. There are some public domain translations of the holy word of God, but the point is that all translations of the word of God should be public domain because it is God's word, not the words of men, therefore people have no right to own a copyright on the word of God and hold back and restrict the distribution of a translation for a fee. Please see the following on modern bible copyrights, that article is called "The Bondage of the Word" https://sellingjesus.org/articles/copyright-and-the-bible