[The following material is from O Timothy magazine, Volume 12, Issue 7, 1995. David W. Cloud, Editor. This material cannot be placed on BBS or Internet sites without express permission from the author. All rights are reserved. O Timothy is a monthly magazine. Annual subscription is US$20 FOR THE UNITED STATES. Send to Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, Michigan 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org. FOR CANADA the subscription is $20 Canadian. Send to Bethel Baptist Church, P.O. Box 9075, London, Ontario N6E 1V0.]

COPYRIGHT AND THE KJV

The following is from the Bible League Quarterly, April-June 1995:

Mention was made in our last issue [of the Bible League Quarterly] of the fact that `the AV is not copyrighted.' What Ron Smith meant, of course, was that it is not subject to copyright laws such as we find with, for instance, the NIV or NKJV. With modern translations of the Bible, permission has to be sought from the publishers before they can be reproduced. In the case of the RAV (the first British edition of the NKJV) we read: `All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Samuel Bagster & Sons Ltd.' Hence, as Mr. Smith said, these new translations cannot be too similar to each other for fear of infringing their copyright. Not a helpful restriction when it comes to rendering the meaning of God's Word!

It is only fair to point out, however, that in one sense the AV is copyrighted: it is Crown Copyright and is subject to the Royal Letters Patent. This means that a publisher must be granted a special License in order to publish an edition of the AV, and stiff copyright restrictions are placed upon the reproducing of parts of it by anybody else, although in practice the spirit of the law permits the free use and quotation of the AV for all necessary purposes.

However, Mr. Smith's original point is valid, namely, that modern translations run the risk of putting avoidance of copyright infringement before the faithful rendering of Holy Scripture into English. This cannot be said of the AV.