Rights and permissions

A site whose whole proposition is that it names its sources cannot afford to be uncertain about them.

What we publish

Every text carries a rights status, and only four of them can be published:

• Public domain. Verified rather than assumed. Most of the corpus.
• Commissioned. Translations we paid for and hold the rights to.
• Permission granted. Explicit written permission on file.
• Licensed. Under terms recorded against the source.

A text whose rights we have not established cannot be published, however well known it is. That rule is enforced by the publishing gate rather than by anyone remembering to apply it.

Why this is stricter than it looks

A surprising number of familiar modern translations are under copyright, including several that people assume are free to reproduce. Rather than argue each one, we lean on genuinely public-domain sources and on translations commissioned for this site.

Public domain is also jurisdictional. A text can be free in one country and not in another, so we record the reasoning against the source rather than flattening it to a yes or a no.

If you hold rights to something here

Write and it comes down while we check. Every text carries its source and rights status, so we should be able to answer quickly and tell you exactly what we believed and why. Contact.

Using our material

The prayers and scriptural texts are not ours to license; their rights sit with the sources each page names. Our own guidance prose and the site design are ours. If you are a hospital, hospice or chaplaincy service wanting to reproduce material for internal use, ask, and the answer is very likely yes.