Can I project more than 500 verses of Scripture over the course of a year? Or, an entire book of the Bible?

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The length is the length of what you quote in a single document. So yes, a new sermon resets the counter. However, if you then publish all your sermons together in a single book, that single book becomes the reference document and can only contain 500 verses in toto (and of course, the rules on selling the text then come into play).

The terms are quite explicit about not amounting to an entire book of the Bible. So yes, you can't do all 25 verses of Philemon in one go. But then you could simply omit v1, which probably leaves enough to be useful.

Upvote:2

Note: I am not a lawyer. This is all uneducated opinion and reasoning.

It's difficult to imagine that any of these companies would press charges (or even accuse you of wrongdoing) for simply using the Bible, since what you're doing is the very thing it was translated for.

It seems like they're trying to protect their assets from being republished without any remuneration, not prevent reasonable use of the work. Sermons really don't count (unless you are recording and rebroadcasting them, perhaps) as a work covered by their restrictions. The sticking point with your question (I presume) is embedding a complete book into a file (PowerPoint or other) for the sake of a visual aid in a sermon. If you don't distribute the file, it's hard to imagine how any copyright owner would have grounds to sue you (not that they can't sue you without grounds).

At worst, it seems like they would only be able to get an injunction issued against you to stop doing that rather than sue you for damages, because I don't know how they could assess any damage (what income have you taken from them)?

In the end, I think it's most important to act with a clean conscience, and if their lawyers want to take issue with what you've done, then try to accommodate them.

In the case of reproducing the entirety of a short book (3 John, e.g.), you could always leave out a verse/passage or use an alternate translation of that it (that reads very similarly, if you like the way it reads) in the document you're creating. This is ridiculously nitpicky, but if you want to deal with lawyers on their level, you ought to be able to satisfy their requirements and still be able to accomplish your goal.

An alternate approach is to be congenial to their draconian rules and only reproduce the most pertinent passages of Obadiah or Jude, going out of your way not to reproduce the entire book. Have someone orate the entire book without reproducing it in your file. If you're dealing with it verse-by-verse, only insert the portions of verses that contain something you want to discuss. It is, at least, a polite way to deal with them, and that's probably worth more than having the text in your docs.

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