Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
We're moving slightly off-topic here, but why are these still copyrighted? Is it the layout, changes in interpretation or revision that makes each edition a new copyright.
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There are literally hundreds of different early Greek manuscripts for the New Testament, all of which are slightly different (in fact there are more differences than there are words in the New Testament!). An editor (or, in the case of something like the Bible, a panel of scholars, normally) looks at all the different sources, considers their relative merits, and puts together what they consider to be the "best" version of the text. Every time someone does that, you get something slightly different. All those that have been done in the last century or so are (obviously) copyrighted.