From "Come back in 20 years to revise your Bible" Toward Community Copyright, Accessible Tools, and the Power to Improve

For most language communities around the world, the copyright for their language’s Scripture is held by an outside agency. No representative body from their community holds copyright over their Scriptures. This means that they:

-cannot print, cannot digitize print-only translations, cannot develop apps, and cannot block the owner’s printings or apps without permission from the outside agency owner;

-cannot develop derivative Sunday School or other materials without permission from the outside agency owner;

-cannot revise their translation as they would like (one group was recently told to wait 20 years!), despite revision being a standard and necessary step of Bible translation, even from the days before digital publishing;

-cannot make their own choices about audio recording timing, method, and distribution;

-cannot revise their Bible text during audio Bible recording, which is when many errors and unnaturalness are detected;

-cannot revise their audio Bible recording when they find issues;

-do not have access to Paratext without the special permission of the owner and have no rights over the language name, product name, attribution, and permissions given in Digital Bible Library (DBL).

ETEN has made efforts to incentivize Bible agencies toward providing Creative Commons licensing for new Scriptures, which would provide access to some, but not all, of the rights listed above.

However, ETEN’s effort does not address the large number of existing Scripture products with no community legal ownership or licensing access. Even for the new translations, it still does not recognize the language communities’ moral rights through legal ownership, attribution, and access to Paratext and DBL. Finally, there seems to be concern among some Bible agencies about even granting Creative Commons licensing.

The USA state of Wyoming provides a simple way in a stable jurisdiction for a community leadership body to gain legal status and thus hold copyright. Independent co-ownership agreements between community leaders and partner agencies should be standard practice for Bible translations and derivative products such as audio recordings. AI tools are becoming increasingly available and accessible (such as AERO Suite) to enable communities to make corrections and revisions to improve their own Bible translations for their own people.