iMurphy

As you are no doubt aware, there is a large movement about in our time called Open Source.  With this tech industry movement came an entire culture, saying that knowledge ought to be free.  There is a small but present percentage of such adherents who are Christian, even some who believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and the final, greatest authority for our lives, carrying the message of Salvation for all persons.  The Bible itself, both its original texts and ancient translations, is older than copyright and not subject to such laws.  Indeed, failure to transmit the Bible (with additions or subtractions) would be easily regarded as a sin by most devout Christians, going against the Great Commission.  As information is circulated more and more freely, some people who made their living in old ways are being displaced.  For example, as young people are more and more content to read documents online, places like the Gutenberg Project will displace publishers of public domain books to a greater and greater extent (though never entirely).  Already in your domain, the entire Greek Bible is available in parsed form, free, from places like unbound.biola.edu .  Perhaps you will never let down your “walled garden“, but it is only a matter of years before enough people “crowd source” the task and duplicate your data.  You do not nor can not own a copyright of the study of the Bible.  I wish you financial success and thank God for what you’ve done and what it’s done for pastors (mine!), but like all industries that make a living on stockpiling information, you will inevitably see that ours is no longer an information economy, but a service one.  One cannot make a living off of ideas for long, since they can not be contained and can always be duplicated.  Please consider contributing to the community of low-income Bible students and finding profit at a more lasting place on the value chain.

The previous was from a letter I sent to a professor at a Reformed Seminary, who makes a living off of royalties from Biblical texts.