A copywork page takes twenty minutes. Choose the verse, set it in a dotted tracing font, four ruled lines underneath, print it Sunday night. The text comes from wherever the text is fastest, which is the search box on a Bible website. Bible Gateway opens on the NIV.

That page is now built out of somebody's copyrighted work.

Nobody is going to knock on your door about one tracing sheet, and this post will not pretend otherwise. But the parent who made that sheet often makes forty more, puts them in a co-op binder, and lists the set on Teachers Pay Teachers for three dollars. The analysis is different at every step. The useful thing is knowing which step you are standing on.

The old words are not the problem

Nothing written in Hebrew in 900 BC is under copyright. Neither is the Greek of the first century. What is under copyright is the English.

A translation is a derivative work. The Copyright Act says so in the definition itself, at 17 U.S.C. 101, and 17 U.S.C. 103(a) confirms that derivative works get protection. Section 103(b) limits that protection to the new material the author contributed. For a translation, the new material is the English sentences. Which is exactly the part you were going to print.

So the question is never how old the Bible is. It is how old that particular English wording is.

The three you can reprint freely

King James, 1611, as revised through the 1769 Oxford text. Public domain in the United States by age. Works published in the United States in 1930 or earlier are out of copyright here as of 1 January 2026, under the 95-year term described in the Copyright Office's Circular 15a and 17 U.S.C. 304. The KJV clears that by three centuries.

One wrinkle if you are not in the States. In Britain the King James never went through ordinary copyright at all. It sits under Crown rights exercised through Letters Patent, and Cambridge University Press has held that patent since 1990, which lets Cambridge print the text and license others to print it on the Crown's behalf (Cambridge University Press, "The Queen's Printer's Patent", read 25 July 2026). That patent runs to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland is administered separately, and Oxford prints under an old privilege of its own, so "the UK" is three answers wearing one coat. If you are printing in Britain, write to the rights desk first and get your answer from them, not from an American blog post.

The World English Bible. A modernization of the American Standard Version of 1901, and the clearest case of the three, because its publisher says it outright: "The World English Bible is in the Public Domain. That means that it is not copyrighted" (eBible.org, read 25 July 2026). Nothing to ask for, nothing to count. The one thing eBible.org does hold is the name, which is its trademark, and it asks that a text you have altered not go out still called the World English Bible. Costs you nothing to honor.

Read it before you commit a term to it. The WEB renders the divine name as Yahweh throughout the Old Testament, so Psalm 23:1 comes out "Yahweh is my shepherd: I shall lack nothing" (WEB) where the King James has "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1, KJV). Some families want that. Some will find a memory verse landing wrong on a child's ear. Decide on purpose, not in March.

Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision, in the 1899 American edition. Public domain in the US by the same age rule, and the right choice for Catholic materials.

Watch the numbering. Douay-Rheims follows the Vulgate, so the shepherd psalm is 22, not 23, and it reads "The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing" (Psalm 22:1, Douay-Rheims). Head a worksheet "Psalm 23" over Douay-Rheims text and a catechist spots it in a second. Book names shift too. Paralipomenon for Chronicles, Sophonias for Zephaniah.

What fair use actually does

Fair use is not a status you hold because you are a homeschooler. It is an argument about one particular use, weighed on the four factors in 17 U.S.C. 107: purpose and character of the use, nature of the work, amount taken, effect on the market. The preamble does name teaching, "including multiple copies for classroom use." That is genuinely in your favor. It is not a permission slip, and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994), is explicit that the factors get weighed together with no single one deciding.

There is also a set of Classroom Copying Guidelines that people quote as though they were law. They are not. Publishers and educators negotiated them, and they sit in the legislative history of the 1976 Act at H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, pages 68 to 70. They set a floor rather than a ceiling: stay inside them and you are almost certainly fine, go past them and you have not automatically done anything wrong. The numbers are small. Short excerpts. Nine instances of multiple copying in one course in one term, and no running the same packet term after term in place of buying the book. Use it as a sanity check. It is not a rule you can cite at anyone.

And 17 U.S.C. 110(1), the face-to-face teaching exemption, is narrower than its reputation. It covers performance and display by instructors or pupils, face to face, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, at a nonprofit educational institution. It does not authorize making copies, which is the thing a worksheet is. And whether a family's kitchen table is a nonprofit educational institution is not a question the statute answers or that we have found settled. So do not lean on it.

The practical line runs about here. A verse hand-lettered on your own whiteboard is not a problem anybody has ever had. Thirty printed sheets for a co-op, every week, out of one translation, starts to look like the repeated substitution the guidelines are written against. Selling the file turns the first factor against you before you have said anything else.

The publishers already told you the limits

This is the part that gets skipped, and it beats any fair use argument you could build. The major publishers post a standing permission. If your quoting fits inside it, you are licensed, and fair use never has to come up.

Biblica allows the NIV to be quoted up to and including 500 verses without written permission, so long as the quotations are not a complete book of the Bible and do not make up 25 percent or more of your work, with a specified notice on the copyright page (Biblica permissions, read 25 July 2026). Crossway's published ESV terms on the same date: 500 verses, not 25 percent or more of the total text, not more than half of any one book, again with a required notice (Crossway permissions, read 25 July 2026). Note that Crossway's required notice has its own conditions buried in it, including that the ESV text may not appear in anything released under a Creative Commons license.

Those are licenses, not statutes. They have been revised before and will be again, so read the page rather than this paragraph. But a unit study with fourteen verses in it sits comfortably inside both, and the whole cost of compliance is one line of small type.

Two smaller traps. Copyright notice has been optional in the US since 1 March 1989 under 17 U.S.C. 401(a), so no © on a page tells you nothing. And in a printed Bible, the section headings, footnotes and cross-references are new material with their own copyright even where the translation under them is public domain, per 103(b) again. Retype the verse. Do not scan the page.

Why this press prints public-domain text only

Because our files are sold to be rewritten.

A permission notice is a condition. It has to stay attached to the work, survive being edited in Word, and still be there when a buyer prints the page in 2031. A license we hold does not travel to the person who bought the file. Public-domain text carries no condition to break. A parent can retype it, reset it, cut it, put it in a co-op binder, and never once think about us or about a publisher.

That has shaped real decisions here. It is why the Catholic edition is Douay-Rheims, and why a verse gets chosen partly for how it reads in the King James.

"And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deuteronomy 6:7, KJV). Those words are meant to be in the mouth and on the table. Getting them there should not require a lawyer.

None of the above is legal advice, and we are not lawyers. It is a map of which statutes and which publisher pages to go read. If you are publishing at scale, pay someone qualified for an hour of their time.

Our records system quotes only KJV, WEB and Douay-Rheims, with book, chapter, verse and translation printed at every quotation. Protestant and Catholic editions. Thirty-nine dollars.