Currently I am looking into a new project to go along with the 6-month New Testiment Bible Reading plan that I put together. That plan has been downloaded almost 3000 times and I’ve received some great feedback about it, including it being used for home school curriculum!
As a companion to the NT Reading Plan I’ve been considering putting together a daily podcast and email so that people can listen to the New Testament in 6-months. In looking at how to best do this I have run into the issue of copyright law and what versions of the Bible I’m able to use for this sort of project …
The most popular, modern versions of the Bible can not be used for a project like this. They have restrictions that allow a maximum of 500 verses, and must not exceed 20% of the printed (or in my case recorded) work. They include, but are not limited to:
- New International Version (NIV)
- New Living Translation (NLT)
- New King James Version (only 250 versus) (NKJV)
- Holman Christian Standard Bible (only 250 verses) (HCSB)
There are a number of Bibles that are available as Public Domain since they are old enough that their copyright as expired. Most of these unfortunately use rather archaic language, which I reckon I would have a rather hard time recording …
- American Standard – ASV1901 (ASV)
- Darby English Bible (DARBY)
- King James Version (KJV)
- Webster’s Bible (WBT)
There are a few other translations out there, including the New English Translation (NET) Bible and the Lexham English Bible, that seem to have fairly open copyright rules, but I’m not a lawyer, and they are unclear enough that I’m not sure if using it in this way would qualify for free use.
Recently there have been efforts to put together Bible translations that can be used without copyright issues. They are published either as Public Domain, or under a open Creative Commons licence. They include:
Those are the two translations that I will be exploring for this project, so we will see how we go …
(Source for most of my research was the Christianity StackExchange Forum)