Content & Copyright

What this page covers

Comment Coach publishes almost nothing. Nearly everything you read inside it is content you brought: a Bible translation you chose, a publication you downloaded, an article you pasted in, or words you wrote yourself. This page says who owns each of those, what we do with them, and what we will not do.

It is one page rather than several, because the answer is largely the same whatever the content is. Where a particular publisher attaches terms of its own, that publisher gets its own section below.

What you bring

Content reaches the app in four broad ways:

• Bible translations — from the built-in catalog of 168 translations in 64 languages, all of them public domain or freely licensed; from Bible modules you already hold in MySword or e-Sword format; from open JSON and SQLite datasets; or from EPUB Bibles you downloaded yourself, from a publisher such as jw.org.
• Publications and articles — books, magazines, lesson material, and devotional readings, imported as EPUB files you obtained yourself. The app parses them into readable sections. It does not supply the files.
• Pages and pasted text — an article you paste in, or a page you save, so that you can work from it while you prepare. It is handled exactly as an imported file is.
• Your own words — the comments, notes, outlines, and recordings you make in the app. Those are yours outright, and nothing else on this page limits what you do with them.

What you import has no catalog listing of its own, because these are files you already hold rather than something we distribute. The Bible catalog links out to the MySword and e-Sword download sites, and the import areas in Bibles and your library accept the files once you have them.

One rule covers all of it

A single rule covers everything above — whoever published it, whatever format it arrived in, whether it is a Bible or a magazine, and whether it is public domain or a copyrighted work you own:

• It stays on your device. We do not keep a copy of it.
• We do not host, redistribute, or republish it.
• We do not make it available to any other user.
• We do not charge for access to it. Importing content is free at every tier, including the free one.

Some publishers set specific terms on top of that. Where they do, we read them, follow them, and say so plainly — which is what the jw.org sections below do.

Who owns what

Copyright in a Bible translation, a book, a magazine, or an article belongs to whoever holds it — the translator, the publisher, the author. Importing a file into Comment Coach does not change that, and neither does anything the app does to the text along the way: splitting it into chapters, building a search index over it, or showing it beside another translation. It remains their work, read by you under whatever permission you obtained it with.

What you write is a separate matter. Your comments, notes, outlines, and recordings are yours. We do not claim ownership of them and we do not train models on them; Your Data Rights covers exporting and deleting them.

If you quote a publication in something you write, ordinary quotation rules apply — the same ones that applied long before any of this was software. Comment Coach helps you prepare a comment. It does not grant you a license to republish someone else's book.

We are not the arbiter of what you may import, and we do not inspect what you bring. A file you obtained lawfully is yours to read in the reader of your choosing, and this is a reader. A file you did not obtain lawfully does not become lawful by passing through us.

What happens when you import

The sequence is the same for every kind of file:

1. You obtain the file — from the publisher's own site, from a store, or from wherever you lawfully got it, using your own browser, on your own device.
2. You import it — you choose to bring the file into Comment Coach through the app's import function. The app never fetches a publisher's file on your behalf.
3. It is stored on your device — the text, together with the publication's own footnotes and cross-references, is saved in your browser's local storage (IndexedDB). The search index is built there too, from your copy. We do not keep a copy of it, and it is never made available to another user.
4. You use it to prepare — references resolve instantly from your local copy, with no network call, no AI credits, and no request to the publisher or to us for the text.

What is EPUB?

EPUB is an open, industry-standard format for digital publications. It was designed so that content can be accessed across a wide variety of applications and devices — not locked to any single tool or platform.

When a publisher makes content available in EPUB format, it is with the understanding that users will access that content through the reading tool of their choice. This is the purpose of the format.

EPUB readers in common use

Millions of people use EPUB files with tools like these every day:

• Apple Books — built into every iPhone, iPad, and Mac
• Google Play Books — built into Android devices
• Calibre — the most widely used open-source e-book manager
• Adobe Digital Editions — Adobe's official EPUB reader
• Kobo Books — Rakuten's reading platform
• Moon+ Reader — popular Android reading app
• EPUBReader — browser extension for Chrome and Firefox

Bible study tools also support EPUB imports. For example, Equipd Bible is an iOS app specifically designed for Bible study that supports importing EPUB Bible files — including those from jw.org — for personal use. Equipd has been available on the Apple App Store for years, following the same approach: no publisher content is bundled in the app; users download files themselves from the publisher's website.

Comment Coach follows this same established pattern.

For users of jw.org publications

We recognize that Jehovah's Witnesses care deeply about how Bible publications are used and shared. We share that respect. Here is how Comment Coach honors those concerns:

What we do

• We direct users to download files from jw.org — the official source — rather than bundling or redistributing any content ourselves.
• We store imported content exclusively on the user's own device.
• We use the content solely for its intended purpose: personal Bible study.
• We clearly present jw.org's Terms of Use and ask users to review and accept them before proceeding.
• We make importing free at every tier, including the free one, so that no one is ever paying us for access to the publisher's content.

What we do not do

• We do not bundle, host, or redistribute any jw.org publication.
• We do not store imported content on our servers, and we do not send it to any third party.
• We do not make imported content available to other users.
• We do not use jw.org trademarks, logos, or branding.
• We do not claim any affiliation with the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or Jehovah's Witnesses.
• We do not take a publication's footnotes or cross-references and apply them to other translations. They are shown while you read the publication they belong to, and nowhere else.

jw.org Terms of Use

The jw.org Terms of Use state that users may “view, download, and print copyrighted materials from this site for personal and non-commercial purposes.” That is the permission a reader relies on when they download a publication for their own study, and it is the permission this feature is built around.

Comment Coach never downloads files from jw.org, on your behalf or otherwise. The app makes no request to jw.org for content at all. You download the file yourself, in your own browser, from the publisher's own site, and then choose whether to import it.

Where this is not simple. The same Terms say you may not “reproduce, duplicate, copy, distribute, or otherwise exploit” the publications “for a commercial purpose or for money (even if no profit is involved).” Comment Coach is a paid product, so we would rather say plainly how we read that than leave it unmentioned. We do not sell access to jw.org content: importing a Bible is free at every tier, including the free one. Nothing published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society is hosted by us, served by us, or part of what we charge for. What we charge for is coaching on the comments you write — the Bible you read while writing them is one you obtained yourself, from the publisher, under the permission above.

If the publisher asked us to stop

We think it is worth deciding this now, while it is hypothetical and nobody is asking. If the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society asked us to stop supporting jw.org publications, we would comply promptly and without argument. Concretely:

• We would remove jw.org editions from the Bible catalog, which turns off the link out to their download page. That is a small change and would ship in hours, not weeks.
• We would leave the Bibles you have already imported alone. They are on your device, you obtained them yourself, and they are not ours to delete.
• We would say so on this page, with the reason, rather than quietly removing it.
• We would continue supporting EPUB import generally, which is support for an open file format rather than for any one publisher.

We publish this because anyone who comes to rely on the feature deserves to know what it rests on. It rests on the publisher's continued willingness, and we would rather say so than imply a permanence we cannot promise.

Your content, your device

Everything you import into Comment Coach is yours, on your device. You can remove any of it at any time, and removal is immediate.

One precise note about sync

If you use Comment Coach on more than one device, you can transfer your library between them. That moves your content only between devices you control, and only when you start the transfer yourself. When the two devices can reach each other directly, the content never touches our servers at all. When they cannot — some home and office networks block a direct connection — the transfer passes through our server to reach your other device: over an encrypted connection, held in memory only for as long as the transfer takes, never written to our database or to disk, and never routed to anyone but your own device.

We describe this precisely rather than telling you the content never touches a server. The shorter sentence would be easier to read and would not be quite true, and on a page about how we handle someone else's publications, being exactly right matters more than sounding reassuring.

If you have questions or concerns about how Comment Coach handles imported content, please contact us at support@comment.coach.