Copyright Law

Copyright law governs who holds the exclusive legal right to copy, publish, translate and adapt a written or artistic work, and for how long that right lasts before the work passes into the public domain. The modern discipline dates to the Statute of Anne, enacted by the British Parliament in 1710, which for the first time vested the right to copy a work in its author rather than in the London Stationers' Company printing guild that had previously controlled publication, and set a fixed term after which a work became free for anyone to reprint.

Scripture translations, hymnals, liturgical settings and devotional art are frequently still under active copyright even when the underlying religious text is ancient and free, a modern English Bible translation, a contemporary worship song or a living author's commentary each carry their own separate copyright term. The atlas checks copyright status before quoting translated scripture or devotional material at length, and copyright law is what supplies the rule for when a translation has entered the public domain and when it has not, independent of how old the original text being translated actually is. A translation published in 1611 and one published in 2011 can carry entirely different legal status even though both render the same ancient chapter, and the atlas treats that distinction as a matter of documented law rather than of the text's own antiquity.