The texts you publish are humanity’s common inheritance. The manuscripts are public domain by virtue of age. The languages are public domain. The methods of textual criticism that produced your editions are public domain. What is not public domain is your editorial work on top of them: the translations, the critical apparatus, the text-critical decisions, the verse divisions, the cross-references, the formatting.
We write to ask you to release that editorial work under a free license.
The scriptural argument
Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn…
Every major religious tradition that uses these texts teaches that scripture should be accessible to all. Locking the best available edition behind a licensing wall is a choice that needs to be justified against that tradition, not the other way around.
The economic argument
The market for print Bibles is not threatened by free digital text. People buy physical Bibles for the weight that says this matters, for ink that sits on the page with a presence no screen can match, for the binding, the study aids, the trust a publisher has earned.
Scripture is not a product that loses value with exposure. It is the kind of text that, the more a person reads, the more they want to read. Free digital availability does not cannibalize print sales; it puts the most compelling material in human history into more hands, and those hands reach for study editions, reference Bibles, and leather-bound gift copies. Every freely-available digital Bible is an on-ramp to the publisher’s print ecosystem.
The most successful Bible in the English language has been free for over three centuries. The King James Version is public domain, and publishers continue to make millions selling it in print. Free access did not destroy the market; it created it. The KJV proves the model: a free text sustains an entire industry of study editions, devotional formats, leather bindings, and gift Bibles. Among modern translations, the Berean Standard Bible has been released into the public domain. Its interlinear data is the richest digital Bible dataset in existence, and bereanbible.com is thriving.
The legacy argument
Tischendorf released his edition into the public domain. Westcott and Hort released theirs. Nestle 1904 is public domain. These are the editions scholars still cite 150 years later. The editions locked behind copyright are the ones that get replaced and forgotten.
A publisher who releases their apparatus under CC BY ensures their editorial decisions become the permanent reference. A publisher who locks it behind a paywall ensures someone will eventually redo the work and render theirs obsolete.
The practical argument
Restrictive licensing fragments the ecosystem. Five different apps each license the same text under five different terms, each with slightly different restrictions. Scholars cannot build interoperable tools. To read two translations of the same psalm side by side, you need permission from two different rights holders. The words of the prophets are subject to a terms-of-service agreement.
Free licensing unifies the ecosystem. One canonical digital text, cited everywhere, improved by everyone. The publisher’s name stays on it forever.
The case against non-commercial clauses
Some publishers offer their texts under licences that permit free use but prohibit commercial use. This sounds like a reasonable compromise. It is not.
The term “commercial” has no settled legal definition in this context. Is a church that sells a study guide containing the text engaged in commerce? Is a nonprofit Bible app with a donation button? A seminary that charges tuition? A podcast that reads scripture on an episode with sponsors? No court has drawn a clear line, and the Creative Commons organisation itself has acknowledged the ambiguity. The result is that everyone who touches the text must make their own guess about what is permitted — and most guess conservatively, which means doing nothing.
A non-commercial clause does not protect revenue. It protects uncertainty. The publisher gains nothing from a seminary deciding not to use their text out of caution. They gain nothing from a developer choosing a different translation because the legal risk of NC is not worth evaluating. The practical effect of NC is not to prevent exploitation — it is to prevent adoption.
CC BY accomplishes everything NC claims to accomplish, without the ambiguity. Attribution is enforceable. The publisher’s name stays on the text. Anyone who builds on it must say where it came from. What they cannot do is stop someone from using it — which is the point.
To nonprofits and denominational bodies
Some of the most important texts are controlled not by commercial publishers but by nonprofit organisations and denominational bodies. The economic arguments above may not apply to you in the same way — your concern is stewardship, not revenue.
We understand the instinct to protect a text from misuse. But a restrictive licence does not prevent misuse — it prevents use. Anyone determined to distort scripture will do so regardless of your licence terms. What the restriction actually prevents is the scholar who wants to build a concordance, the developer who wants to make the text accessible to the blind, the translator who wants to produce a minority-language edition, and the student who wants to compare your apparatus with another.
CC BY protects against misattribution. It does not protect against disagreement. No licence can. The choice is between a text that is used — sometimes in ways you would not choose — and a text that is not used at all.
The competitive argument
The Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft’s copyright on NA28/UBS5 is the single biggest obstacle to digital biblical scholarship. Every year that apparatus stays locked, more scholars build tools against free alternatives: Robinson–Pierpont and Nestle 1904. The Center for New Testament Restoration has gone further, applying statistical methods to 194 digitized manuscript transcriptions to produce a free critical text with full apparatus under CC BY 4.0. The lock-in strategy is not just failing in slow motion; it is being actively outflanked by open data and computational methods that did not exist when the licensing model was designed.
Publishers who release first get cited first. The first free critical apparatus for the Greek NT will become the default reference for a generation of scholars. That is a legacy worth more than any licensing fee.
What we are asking
We are asking publishers to release their editorial work under a free license: the text, the apparatus, the study notes, the cross-references. The typesetting, layout, and physical product remain theirs. A free digital text is not a replacement for a printed study Bible — it is the foundation on which the next generation of readers discovers that they need one.
CC BY is enough. We do not need CC0. Attribution is fine. We just need the four freedoms: to use, study, modify, and redistribute.
The texts you publish were given freely. The traditions they belong to were transmitted freely. The only thing standing between that inheritance and the next generation of readers is a licensing decision.
This letter is also addressed to the scholarly societies and academic presses that publish reference editions. Please also read our appeal to scholars, which asks editors and lexicographers to release their editorial work under free licenses.