American Catholic Bishops: Stop Reading from the Bible

Friday September 16, 2005

This is a very interesting case: a Catholic who created a podcast of the the daily scripture readings from the Catholic Lectionary has gotten a quick "cease and desist" letter for violating copyright. That's right, reading the Bible to others violates copyright.

Verbum Domini, the site providing the podcast, had been using the New American Bible translation and the USCCB owns the copyright to it. Doxaweb says "Something is wrong when some of Christ's workers are squabbling about who owns the rights to the fishing nets..." Very true, but let's face facts: the Catholic Church here is acting like any other large corporation or organization.

Unfortunately, the values which animate such entities are not the same as those which are supposed to ideally animate a religious community, a church congregation, or even Christianity in general. Large corporations have to be concerned with liability, copyright, pensions, anti-discrimination laws, zoning regulations, environmental impact statements, etc. Sometimes, the two sets of values conflict — and you can see what the entity really values most based upon which of the two they choose to go with.

Amy Welborn comments on just how strict the NAB regulations are:

There is no secret about permissions policies to use various Bible translations (which, in answer to a commentor, are all copyrighted, of course.) The issues is that the NAB permissions policy is much narrower than most others. ... Any use of any segment of the translation, no matter how brief, must be approved.

Here's the permissions policy for the NRSV, by contrast. You can use up to 500 verses without permission, providing that the Scripture content does not comprise an entire book or more than 50% of the entire work in which it is quoted. The NIV guidelines are similar.

As a matter of law, I think that the NAB restrictions are simply unenforceable. It's a matter of fair use: I can legally quote small portions of a copyrighted text without violating the law. Domenico Bettinelli quotes what I assume is the NAB — and I shall do the same:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.” Jesus replied, “Do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us.” Mark 9:38-40

Will the USCCB now send me a threatening letter? I suggest that everyone quote from the NAB, even though it's not the best translation out there. The USCCB can either go after every blogger around or ignore it. If they go after every blogger, they will quickly run out of resources. If they ignore it, they will undermine any future case they have against people like Verbum Domini. In the meantime, though Verbum Domini has decided to use a different translation in order to avoid legal problems.

On a final note, it occurs to me that one of the positions adopted by the Protestant Reformation was that the Catholic Church had inappropriately prevented people from reading the Bible on their own and in their own language. Now, they appear to be doing something strikingly similar. I have to ask: haven't they learned anything?

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tags: Catholic, Catholicism, copyright, Bible