Holman Christian Standard Bible

 I was already aware that the NET Bible was developed because Bible.org was wanting to publish free Bible studies on the Internet, and had problems getting copyright permissions. They put it like this in their preface:

Bible.org’s ministry objective is to be used by God to mature Christians worldwide. To accomplish this we needed to quote a modern Bible translation in the production of thousands of trustworthy Bible Study resources that could be offered on the Internet for free. We predicted in 1995 that the number of Bible verses quoted in these studies would soon surpass available legal permission limits. We tried for a year, but could not obtain the necessary permissions. Lack of a legal ability to quote the Bible online makes online Bible studies impossible and threatened bible.org’s “Ministry First” model. Quite simply the only way we could secure permission to quote a modern Bible was to sponsor a new translation – the NET Bible. We now want to ensure that other ministries and authors don’t experience the same roadblocks. The NET Bible is not just for bible.org, but for everyone.

(There's also more written here.)

But I was surprised to learn today that the Holman Christian Standard Bible was also published partly for reasons relating to copyright as explained here:

In 1998 the people at Broadman & Holman were seeking to buy the copyright of some already-existing Bible version for use in their publishing projects. For many years they had been using the New International Version, but this was not convenient for them, because the copyright holder of the NIV (the International Bible Society) had sold exclusive North American publishing rights for their translation to the Zondervan corporation in Grand Rapids, and Zondervan would allow other publishers to use the NIV only under some very expensive and restrictive license agreements.

 So one just can't help wondering how many Christian ministries around the world continue to be frustrated in their outreaches and discipleship programs because of copyrights on Bibles. Personally, I think the world is ripe for a new approach.

The M108 project

Ryan Cartwright, a web developer / IT consultant in the UK, writes in his Crimperman blog about a new project, tentatively called m108 (from Matthew 10:8 "...you received freely, so freely give."). He's started a discussion about how to best encourage Christians to make music, video, art, literature, etc. freely available on the Internet.

So far he seems to have attracted about just a few people who've expressed some interest in his ideas. Obviously, you need to have a much higher profile way of making your ideas and site known in order to attract sufficient interest to really get the ball rolling. It seems you need a critical mass of several hundreds of people to even get started; several thousands to make even a small ripple in the pond. But maybe one high-profile artist getting involved could have a greater effect than even tens of thousands of unknown individuals???

That's why I've dreamed a lot (esp. last year) about starting a high-profile lobbying organisation called FreelyGiven.org or something similar, to seek sponsorship in order to personally contact or even visit high profile Christian artists and ministries in order to encourage them to make more of their output available freely to the church world wide (esp. the rapidly growing church in developing countries). But alas, too many things to do, and only one lifetime to do it in...

Scripture Tools for Every Pastor (STEP)

Tyndale House has an interesting project to provide Bible-study tools for pastors. See the writeup here, and also here. Looks very interesting and encouraging. Now if we could only use or extend it for Bible translation...

The wheels keep turning

Another long, but insightful blog by Tim over at Distant Shores Media (DSM) again explains how copyrights of Christian materials can limit discipleship. He also talks about a forthcoming Open Discipleship License -- it's not completely clear but it sounds like something that DSM is developing as a niche alternative to Creative Commons licensing.

Trickles turn into rivers

Kudos to programmer Michael Paul Johnson for realising many years ago that Bible copyrights impede a lot of good, constructive Christian activities in the digital/Internet age, and for adapting and editing the now out-of-copyright American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901 into the World English Bible (WEB), which is given as a public domain gift to the world.

I came across it a couple of years back as I wrestled with similar concerns, and considered joining MPJ's effort. But although we have many overlapping interests, I was aiming at a different audience, and decided to move towards a similar project, but named The Open English Translation (OET) Bible. Imitation being the best form of flattery, I have also started by updating English words in the ASV (e.g., seeketh -> seeks, prayest -> pray) and making some other automated changes. In my spare time for the last few weeks, I have been learning the Pinax/Django platform to try to find an effective way to host a Bible editing wiki-type site.

Then last week, I came across The Open English Bible. It starts with the Twentieth Century New Testament (which I had never heard of) and does something similar. Obviously, with a website already up, and a preview release of Mark already available, lawyer Russell Allen is already way ahead of me! (It has a Creative Commons Attribution licence and like me, he's also a Python man.)

I'm sure there's others too out there -- the Net is a BIG place! I know that Door43 is also trying to do something similar.

So is this encouraging or discouraging? The trickle turns to a stream. Might it turn into a river? At least I was probably on to a good thing, even if I'm now just one of many. At the risk of stubbornly continuing with the individualistic "do your own thing anyway" philosophy, I think I'll continue dreaming and slowly plodding forward for now. I'll try to start writing more about my OET intentions soon...

Added P.S.: I knew there was another one I should have mentioned. Kata Biblon (meaning: according to the book) has set up the Wiki English Translation (WET), also taking inspiration from MPJ and based on the WEB. Thomas Moore has already done a LOT of work to get this up and going.

Christianity and Copyright

I don't have time to craft my own blogs yet, I guess because I'm still spending time on the net learning what others are up to. And I keep discovering more people with overlapping ideas. Here's another at Nathan Smith's blog.

A thought-provoking lecture

As well as my interest in the Bible, I'm also a computer "geek", and I was pleased to find a link on OSNews (which is a site about computer operating systems that I read) to an excellent lecture about copyright in the digital world from Harvard law Professor Lawrence Lessig. The link is here, and I too highly recommend that anyone who is seriously interested in this important topic view the 50-minute lecture.