by Jorge

Freely ye have receive, freely give“; ” He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things”

This month has been particularly active with issues related to copyrights. In one instance, we found out that someone copied the Indonesian Bible from our website, with our format and logo, and made an application out of it. Since the Gospel is being preached we would otherwise not mind if it did not contain advertisement, which the developer included on the app. Ultimately our problem is that we might have to respond to some Bible Society when they find out that someone is making profit (from the ads) out of ‘their’ translation of the Bible. If so, they will eventually approach us because the developer, of all things, left our email address on the application!! Actually, someone already wrote to us this week and complained about the advertisement on that app and how unchristian that is, etc…

On the brighter side, through this, we confirmed how far reaching these digital means are and how the Gospel is being preached in a measure never before experienced in the history of mankind: We found another Bible app in Indonesian that has been downloaded more than 1 million times, producing the most amazing reviews. Considering that Indonesia is mostly a Muslim country and considering that to print one million Bibles would cost millions of dollars besides being a logistic nightmare,  we have to be excited about this and our own contribution to this process and once again praise God for the privilege to be part of this calling.

Now, it would be tragic, following an hypothetical trend, as seen in the Aaron Swartz case, if this Indonesian developer now ‘responsible’ for distributing more than 1 million free Bibles, would one day be charged with theft by some Bible Society or corporation who felt robbed of their profits. As Christians, holding ownership interests and legitimate heirs of the Holy Bible, we must defend and protest against the commercialization of its content and oppose copyrights of Sacred Scriptures. This is a moral stand but also a legal one since the original of the Bible, the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, are NOT and should never be copyright-able.

Thank God, that as far as we know, all our Bibles are in the Public Domain, or can be used under ‘fair use’, public interest and public education provisions. However, fair use policies and even public domain, could one day eventually be discarded and hinder the free distribution of the Word of God.

This is a matter to keep in our prayers.

Fair use