Permission was granted for reprinting what?

City News recently ran an article on “Action taken to Rectify Citation Issues” regarding Kong Hee’s plagiarism of certain articles and infringement of copyright by claiming copyright when he printed them in his books “Renewing your Spiritual…” KH claimed he and others concerned “had taken measures to do what is necessary to put things right”. What caught my attention was the statement, “One such example is portions that were taken from “The Leadership Bible, New International Version.” In March 2010, Kong’s editorial team wrote to publisher Zondervan Publishing House to seek permission to reprint these portions in the Daily Devotion. The Leadership Bible is authored/edited by Sid Buzzell, Kenneth Boa and Bill Perkins. Permission was granted the following month, stating that “since [the request to reprint] falls under our fair use guidelines (you are using less than 500 words), Zondervan is happy to grant permission at no charge”. The article can be read here http://www.citynews.sg/CNnewspaper/cnjune2010p22/

I am a little curious as to the exact nature of their request for re-producing the articles. 1) Did they SPECIFICALLY STATE their request was to print some of the articles/notes from the Leadership Study Bible? 2) Or did they JUST REQUEST TO reproduce from the Leadership Bible? There is a difference depending on how the written request is crafted. If it is the latter request, Zondervan could be thinking the request is to reprint the NIV BIBLE TEXT IN A COMMERCIAL REFERENCE, not for reprinting of the articles. Looking at Zondervan’s above reply, this may be the permission granted Kong’s team. Zondervan’s reply is based on fair use of the NIV text which is freely given. Just look inside any Zondervan-published Bible. Stated in the inside page is “the NIV TEXT may be quoted in any written form…, up to and inclusive of 500 verses without express written permission of the publisher…” They have written fair use guidelines but it is meant for the NIV text and these guidelines are worded very closely in Zondervan’s reply to KH’s team.

The articles/notes in the Leadership Study Bible are however a different thing. In any study/devotional Bible, these are the intellectual property of the person who wrote them, not necessarily the publisher. Just check any study Bible to ascertain this. In the case of the Leadership Bible, the copyright remains with Buzzell & Boa and so Zondervan has no right to grant permission for anyone to re-print them. In mid-March, I did query Buzzell & Boa as to their copyright ownership of the Leadership Study Bible articles. They replied (in their own words) “Zondervan turned the rights to the material over to the authors” (i.e. Buzzell & Boa). So how can Zondervan grant permission in April 2010 (according to City News) to reprint the articles? In fact, the articles/notes from the Leadership Study Bible have already been re-printed by Buzzell & Boa in other books by other publishing houses. KH’s excellent backup team can ascertain this for themselves.

So many questions to ask over what is a simple copyright issue! Did KH’s team SPECIFICALLY ASK to reprint the articles/notes from the Leadership Study Bible? HOW CAN Zondervan grant permission for the reprint of something they have no copyright to? Is the Buzzell & Boa team MISTAKEN in thinking they have copyright to the articles? Has the Buzzell & Boa team’s publishing houses INFRINGED ON COPYRIGHT by printing the Leadership Study Bible articles in the books of Buzzell & Boa?

I sincerely hope this article will be helpful to KH’s team to make the necessary clarifications. After all, they should try to be sure so as to avoid more legal complications of infringement of copyright should they reprint “Renewing your Spiritual…”