Does anyone (besides God) own the rights to the Bible, or is it public domain and any schmo can print copies of it?
Since my Bible has a copyright notice in it, I am guessing a few things:
(A) The translation itself is copyrighted. Anyone is free to get a copy of the oldest exisiting documents and retranslate it, but the NIV, NKJV, RSV et al are all copyrighted as translated versions of those documents.
(B) All the footnotes, appendixes, concordances and other nonscriptual information are copyrighted.
I think the King James Version is the only version that isn’t copyrighted, which is one reason why some people only use the KJV.
Any translation published in the US before 1906 is probably in the public domain. This includes the Revised Version (published in the 1880s), as well as the KJV that it’s based on. (Be careful, because other translations have similar names, like the Revised Standard Version that came out in 1965).
There are many other old English translations, such as those of Tyndale, Coverdale, The Geneva Bible, and the Douay Bible. All of these are older than the KJV.
The cutoff date for a public domain text in the U.S. is currently about 1924. Anything before that is public domain.
The KJV is much older than that, so it PD. There are other bible versions that would be copyrightable. I believe the “Good News Bible” could have copyright protection, but the authors put it in the public domain deliberately to spread the word.