The previous page described the fence. This room is what happens when it actually gets tested: ten real episodes, from the Crown's printing patent in the courts of the early 1700s to AI permissions pages written in the last few years. Court cases, a secret colonial press, licensing decisions, one public reversal — each told only as far as the verified record goes.
1712–1839Historical
The Crown's patent goes to court
For over a century, the Crown's Bible-printing patent was fought over in court. John Baskett bought the English patent in 1709, and in Baskett v. Parson he prosecuted an agent of a rival printer for selling Edinburgh-printed Bibles in England, claiming his patent covered Scottish-printed Bibles too. After Baskett's bankruptcy, his assignees sued the University of Cambridge over Cambridge's own separate, centuries-old Bible-printing privilege. In Scotland, the King's Printer Sir David Hunter-Blair sued to block England-printed Bibles from being imported and sold there. And in Ireland, Grierson v. Jackson tested whether the Crown's patent covered Bibles generally or only official church editions — though that case's outcome was less decisive than it's often retold as being.
Outcome: These were live commercial fights over who could print the Bible and where — printer against printer, patent-holder against university, kingdom against kingdom. The record documents that they were fought, not a clean verdict for each one. Read Grierson v. Jackson especially carefully: it's often cited as having settled the question, but the actual result was narrower than that.
Printed in secret: the first English Bible in America
A longstanding bibliographical account identifies a Bible printed in Boston around 1752 by Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green for bookseller Daniel Henchman as the first English-language Bible printed in the American colonies. The edition carried a London imprint rather than naming Boston.
Outcome: The American Antiquarian Society preserves both the scholarly case and its uncertainty: the edition is historically attributed to the Boston press, but the evidence is bibliographical rather than a surviving printer's declaration or court record.
After Vatican II moved the Mass into English and encouraged congregational singing, many Chicago-area Catholic parishes photocopied F.E.L. Publications' hymnals and songsheets into homemade songbooks without paying for a license. F.E.L. — owned by the composer Dennis J. Fitzpatrick — sued the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago for copyright infringement.
Outcome: The Seventh Circuit affirmed the finding of infringement. Final actual damages were set at $190,400 — well below the $3.1 million figure that had been reported at earlier stages of the litigation. The case's longer shadow is what came after: it is widely cited in church-copyright literature as the direct catalyst for the creation of CCLI — Christian Copyright Licensing International — a few years later, giving churches a lawful blanket way to reproduce hymn lyrics.
Meadowgreen Music Co. v. Voice in the Wilderness Broadcasting
Voice in the Wilderness Broadcasting, a religious radio station, and its principal Ralph McBride broadcast 15 copyrighted Christian worship songs without an ASCAP performance license. An investigator documented the broadcasts on May 30–31, 1990, and Meadowgreen Music Co. took the station to court.
Outcome: The court awarded $3,500 per infringement across all 15 proven violations — $52,500 in total statutory damages — plus a permanent injunction barring further unlicensed public performance of ASCAP members' copyrighted music.
The Lockman Foundation, copyright holder of the NASB, had partnered for over 30 years with TEAM — The Evangelical Alliance Mission — to produce Asian-language Bible translations, including a 1970 Japanese Bible. In 1986, TEAM's Japan affiliate and the Japanese translators registered themselves with Japanese authorities as the Japanese Bible's copyright owners, without Lockman's knowledge. Lockman said royalties stopped and that it had channeled roughly $2 million toward translations that never materialized; TEAM and its Japanese affiliate Domei disputed this. Lockman sued TEAM, the affiliate, and missionary Kenneth G. McVety in US federal court, alleging copyright infringement and RICO violations.
Outcome: The district court dismissed the case on forum non conveniens grounds — ruling that Japan was the more appropriate forum — and the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal in 1991. This was a procedural dismissal, not a ruling on who owned the copyright. The underlying ownership dispute was never decided on the merits in US courts, and as of a 1992 report it remained pending before a Japanese court, with no resolution publicly disclosed.
In August 2016, Crossway — owner of the English Standard Version — announced that the ESV text would remain unchanged "in all future editions... in perpetuity," explicitly comparing this to how the King James Version's text has been fixed since 1769. The announcement followed the finalizing of 52 word-level changes, the most scrutinized being Genesis 3:16, changed from "your desire shall be for your husband" to "your desire shall be contrary to your husband." New Testament scholar Scot McKnight published a widely circulated post, "The New Stealth Translation: ESV," criticizing the change and its timing; Christian Post, Christianity Today, and CBN News covered the backlash. This is a publishing and editorial policy story, not a lawsuit — no court or regulator was involved at any point. Only the “permanent, never revised again” framing was ultimately at stake here — not the 52 wording changes themselves, which stood regardless of what happened next.
“We have become convinced that this decision was a mistake. We apologize for this and for any concern this has caused for readers of the ESV.”
Outcome: On September 28, 2016, Crossway publicly reversed the decision. The 2016 wording changes, including Genesis 3:16, stayed; only the "permanent, never again revised" framing was dropped. The ESV has in fact been revised again since, as reported in 2025 coverage.
Crossway pulls the ESV from open-source Bible apps
For about 18 years, the open-source SWORD Project, run by CrossWire Bible Society, distributed the ESV under a standing permission arrangement — feeding free Bible apps built on the SWORD engine, notably the Android app And Bible. In June 2019, Crossway's digital licensing representative told CrossWire directly: "Crossway does not wish to have you do this [distribute] with our content" and "Crossway is not interested in granting you a license to distribute the ESV from your server." The same communication included a bill for roughly $1,400 in back licensing fees accrued during a decade of unresolved talks about migrating ESV distribution onto Crossway's own servers — a migration Crossway itself never completed. This was a licensing and permissions decision, not a lawsuit or a formal takedown notice — but it functioned as one.
“I have a feeling that we can't do anything about this any more... Crossway could easily fix this by re-allowing distribution of their bible module.”
Outcome: The ESV module was pulled from CrossWire's repository and disappeared from SWORD-based apps, including And Bible. A GitHub tracking issue — And Bible #390, opened June 8, 2019 — stayed open for more than four years before the app's maintainer closed it in August 2023 as an admitted dead end. No official restoration ever happened; only informal user workarounds — archived copies, DIY conversions — surfaced in the thread.
Pastor Gabriel Hughes publishes a podcast reading through the Legacy Standard Bible, a copyrighted Lockman Foundation translation, with no commentary. The LSB's public quotation policy allows up to 1,000 verses but excludes a complete book; uses beyond that allowance require express written permission.
Outcome: The podcast is live and continuing. Its public page does not say whether a separate license exists, so this site makes no claim of infringement or publisher action. The record illustrates the distinction between a public quotation allowance and any private permission a creator may have negotiated.
CCLI describes its Church Copyright Licence in terms of worship songs and hymns: projecting and printing lyrics, recording worship services, and making certain arrangements or translations. Bible verse text is not among the published coverage on that license page.
Outcome: This is a scope distinction, not an enforcement case. A church reproducing Scripture should check the Bible translation's own permissions; CCLI's song license is not a substitute for the rights holder's Bible-text policy.
The Lockman Foundation's official permissions page names Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini. It permits AI systems to quote up to 1,000 verses in one response, even when those quotations make up the whole response, provided they do not constitute an entire book and carry the requested attribution.
Outcome: The same policy says this dynamic-quotation allowance does not authorize bulk downloading, scraping, or standalone training datasets. Publisher terms therefore distinguish a generated answer from acquiring a translation wholesale.