Post #3994775
2026-07-21 20:03 UTC
One of the protagonists of The Novel is a pastor. There's several cases of people quoting the Bible.
There's more than one translation of the Bible in the public domain but going with KJV has certain insinuations for the characters that I might not always be interested in insinuating.
If it's a Catholic character, I could go with a Douay-Rheims but going Tyndale, Geneva, or Bishop's Bible for a Protestant is several more centuries out of date than KJV.
I found out about NET recently but, despite their reputation of having a friendly copyright, I cannot make heads or tails of what to do when quoting it in a novel. I'm certainly not emailing them to get permission for something that, honestly, I should not have to do just to do a verse or two of any translation of the Bible.
So, all the Protestants get the KJV on account of I don't have anything better and reasonably safe. Sorry, Protestants. I'm not trying to paint you with the KJV-onlyist label. That's just the copyright situation right now.
Replies (1)
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@JallBarret@hol.ogra.ph 2026-07-21 20:57
I imagine this is a niche problem. It's certainly the only work I recall doing where I needed to worry about Bible copyrights. That said, I did find a possible solution. The MLV copyright policy is extremely reasonable. I have to find out whether the verses themselves are going to work for what I'm doing but this is a pretty good sign.