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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

* This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.

To paraphrase Red Dwarf:

Newsreader: Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.

That's a quote, not a paraphrase

I can't find an authoritative source for the original quote, so I found something that I believe to be close but didn't want to give it the authority of "quote" as it could be innacurate.

Many bible translations are in fact copyrighted.

Hopefully not by unrelated third parties that like to release bots that claim all sorts of random content is under their copyright and take it down.

I don’t think this is surprising? KJV, for example, is such a foundational and original cornerstone of English language poetry that if it were to have been created in 2020 I would fully expect it to be copyrighted.

It's under copyrightish in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Copyright_s...

"[T]the letters patent are held by the Queen's Printer [… T]he Queen's Printer is now Cambridge University Press […] Cambridge University Press permits the reproduction of at most 500 verses for 'liturgical and non-commercial educational use; if their prescribed acknowledgement is included, the quoted verses do not exceed 25% of the publication quoting them and do not include a complete Bible book."

The monarchy is founded on "the grace of God" so it makes a kind of twisted sense that they should collect the license fee to peddle God's book.

Given that God himself is credited as author of at least parts of the Bible, the "life of the author plus 70 years" doctrine of copyright should help keep the Bible out of the public domain for the foreseeable future.

It's OK nobody agrees on who actually represents god so nobody has clear standing to sue or rather everyone thinks they do and would most certainly spend the next century suing each other and you could claim to need to hold any suit against you until all their suits against each other were settled.

> nobody agrees on who actually represents god

That's only true if “nobody” can reach up to approximately 1 billion people.

“Not everybody” ≠ “nobody”.

Is the crown ripping off God? Or have they been giving the Almighty his royalty checks every month?

It sounds like an MIT license.

THIS INCOMPLETE NON BIBLE BOOK IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND EXPRESS OR IMPLIED...

But would it have attained that status if it could not Have been reproduced easily?

I find it surprising; inhibiting the copying of the Bible would seem to contradict most of the goals of the Church.

Many (most?) of the full texts are available online through authorized sources. Copyright is exercised as a means of quality control as much as if not more than as a mean of generating revenue/restricting distribution.

>through authorized sources

That can be just God's bookshelf itself right?

>Copyright is exercised as a means of quality control

Is that God too, or another 'authorized source' like the Vatican? ;)

Protestant translations tend to be held by publishers, I believe, with Zondervan being the biggest player, I think. I can't speak too much about how all of that works.

For Catholic translations there's a requirement that a Bishop sign off on the accuracy/suitability of the translation and its accompanying commentary (at the minimum, a Catholic Bible will include references to parallel/related passages in the other parts of the Bible and usually also includes significant additional commentary). The most commonly used Catholic Bible in the US has its copyright held by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops who have published the full text on their website as well as have authorized multiple (20, according to Wikipedia) publishers to produce print editions.

A lot of Christian worship music is also copyrighted, and churches pay for licenses.

To be more specific, there is no royalty required to perform music as part of a worship service. However, the church is required to pay to license sheet music for all performers.

>there is no royalty required to perform music as part of a worship service.

An in-person service yes. But if it's streamed online I think a license is required.

I just looked and it appears to be the case based on the music publisher's website that I looked at. When I used to do liturgical music, there was no such thing as streamed online.

Turn Turn Turn by the Byrds

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