When choosing a source text from which to do a translation, there are two reasons why it is important to consider the copyright and licensing issues. First, if you translate from a copyrighted work without prior permission, you are breaking the law because translation is a right reserved for the owner of the content. In some places, copyright infringement is a criminal offense and may be prosecuted by the government without the copyright holder’s consent! Second, when a translation is done from a copyrighted work, the translation is the intellectual property of the copyright holder of the source text. They maintain all the rights of the translation just as they do with the source text. For these and other reasons, unfoldingWord will only distribute translations that are not in violation of copyright law.
Content created by unfoldingWord® is released under a **Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA)** (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). We believe this license is the greatest help to the church because it is permissive enough to allow translation and other derivatives to be made from it, but not so permissive that those derivatives can be locked up under restrictive licenses. For a complete discussion on this issue, read The Christian Commons (see https://www.unfoldingword.org/tcc/) or Letting Go (see https://www.unfoldingword.org/letting-go).
Source texts can be used if they are in the public domain or are available under one of the following licenses, which permit translated work to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License:
* All source texts that appear as source texts in translationStudio or translationCore have been reviewed and are legal for use by anyone as a source text.
* Before anything is published by unfoldingWord, the source text must be reviewed and available under one of the licenses listed above.
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