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: 138 of them public domain or freely licensed, plus 30 jw.org editions of the New World Translation, which are copyrighted and which the catalog links out to rather than supplying. Or 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.
• 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. This one is different from a file you import: a pasted article is sent to our server, split into its paragraphs there, and those paragraphs are saved to your private account as excerpts — the second rule below, not the first.
• 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, e-Sword, and jw.org download sites, and the import areas in Bibles and your library accept the files once you have them.

Two rules cover all of it

Two rules cover 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.

The file stays on your device. We do not upload it and we do not keep a copy of it. It lives in your browser’s storage and is read from there. If someone asked us to hand over a publication you imported, we would have nothing to give them.

The excerpts you work on are saved to your private account. When you comment on a paragraph, that paragraph is saved alongside your comment so your work reaches your other devices. That copy is stored under your account, readable only by you, never pooled with anyone else's, and never shown to another user. What we send to an AI provider when you ask for coaching, and what they keep, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Both rules share the same limits:

• 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.

We split this into two rules rather than one because the one-rule version was not quite true, and this page is the wrong place to be approximately right.

What we still do not claim

The obvious sentence for a page like this is “your content is never used to train anything.” It is deliberately not here. The Privacy Policy states the position more precisely than one sentence can — inputs deleted within 30 days, retained data not used for training without our express permission, flagged content held up to two years. A blanket claim would read better and be less accurate.

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 share

Comment Coach lets you share a comment — with a study partner, or with a group.

What travels is your comment and the reference it answers: “The Watchtower, June 2026 — article title, par. 12.” The publisher’s paragraph does not travel. If the person opening your link has the publication, their own copy renders the text. If they do not, they see the reference, so they can get it the same way you did. Where a translation is public domain or freely licensed, its verse text may travel with the citation — hiding an ASV verse behind a reference helped nobody. Anything we cannot positively identify as open is treated as restricted.

The same is true of group sessions and daily-text challenges. Participants see the reference and each other’s answers. They do not receive the publisher’s text from us, because we do not send it.

This is deliberate, and it is the one place where we changed the product rather than the wording. Sharing your own words is yours to do. Sharing the publisher’s words is not. Building it this way means we never have to ask you to be careful about the difference.

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. The file itself never leaves your device, and nothing you import is ever 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. Reading, searching, and comparing translations all happen on your device and work offline. Two exceptions, both named elsewhere on this page: coaching sends the paragraph you are working on along with your comment, and an installed jw.org Bible is checked against the publisher's media API for a newer edition.

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.

Watch Tower publishes in both. Its own app uses JWPUB, a proprietary format; the same publications are also offered in EPUB, open and unencrypted, with no DRM. A publisher that maintains a proprietary format for its own reader and an open one alongside it is not saying the open one was meant only for that reader. That is what the split is for.

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 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 stay bound to the edition they came from — stored with it on your device, and never ported onto another translation's text.

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 a publication from jw.org, on your behalf or otherwise. You download the file yourself, in your own browser, from the publisher's own site, and then choose whether to import it. There is one request the app does make to the publisher, and it is not for a file: if you have installed a jw.org Bible, the app asks their media API whether a newer edition exists. That exchange is a checksum and a date in each direction — roughly a kilobyte, no text, and nothing about you beyond the IP address your browser would send to any site. It is listed in the <a href="/privacy">Privacy Policy</a> with the other recipients.

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 a permission the publisher granted in writing: their Terms of Use allow you to download their publications for your own personal study, and they publish those files in EPUB — an open format they ship alongside their own proprietary one, precisely so that they can be read in the tool of your choosing.

We would still stop if they asked. Not because we think we would have to, but because we would rather have their goodwill than an argument.

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 something on this page does not match what the software does, tell us at support@comment.coach and we will correct it. Questions about how Comment Coach handles imported content are welcome at the same address.

Copyright complaints

If you hold rights in a work and believe material accessible through Comment Coach infringes them, our designated agent and the full notice and counter-notice procedure are on the Copyright Complaints page. We would rather have a conversation than a notice — but the formal route is there, and it works.

What this page got wrong

Corrections to this page are recorded here rather than made quietly. Each entry says what the page claimed, what was wrong with it, and what replaced it. Newest first.

August 27, 2026

• Struck, and in a worse place: “The content stays on your device — and we never store it.” The sentence below was corrected on this page months of drafting ago, but the same claim was still being shown in the dialog that asks you to accept jw.org’s Terms of Use before we send you to their download page — in English and in Spanish. A page that asks to be checked against the software is the wrong place to be approximately right; the screen where we ask you to rely on what we say is the worst one. It now carries both rules, and everyone who accepted the earlier wording is being asked again.
• Narrowed: “The app makes no request to jw.org for content at all.” Too absolute. No file is ever fetched — that part was and is true, and it is the part that matters. But if you have installed a jw.org Bible, the app does ask the publisher's media API whether a newer edition exists, and that is a request. It carries a checksum and a date, no text, and about a kilobyte. Saying “no request at all” on a page that asks to be checked against the software was the wrong sentence to be loose in.
• Struck: the catalog is “all of them public domain or freely licensed.” It is not. Thirty of the 168 entries are jw.org editions of the New World Translation, which are copyrighted and which we link out to rather than supply. Our own code has always tagged them as restricted and treated them that way; only this sentence said otherwise. It now gives the split. The same paragraph named MySword and e-Sword as the sites the catalog links out to, and omitted jw.org, which is where those thirty entries point.
• Struck: “It stays on your device. We do not keep a copy of it.” The page carried one rule where it needed two. The file you import does stay on your device. The paragraph you comment on does not — it is saved to your account so your work reaches your other devices. One sentence covered the first case and quietly contradicted the second. The two rules above replace it.
• Removed: “We do not store imported content on our servers, and we do not send it to any third party.” Wrong on both halves. Passages you comment on are stored server-side, and the paragraph you are working on is sent to an AI provider when you ask for coaching. We removed the sentence rather than narrowing it, because a claim wrong in both directions is not repaired by qualification. What is actually sent, and what the provider keeps, is in the Privacy Policy.
• Changed the product instead of the wording: a shared link no longer carries the publisher's paragraph. A shared comment used to travel with the paragraph it answered. There was no wording that would have made that acceptable, so the payload changed instead. “What happens when you share” describes what it does now.
• Added once it was true: “never pooled with anyone else's.” This clause was written before it could be said honestly, and kept off the page until it could. Two search indexes had been holding this text in a single place shared across accounts. The sentence went in after the text came out of them.
• Struck: “It rests on the publisher's continued willingness.” A mistake in the other direction — this gave away a position we hold. Reading a file you downloaded yourself is not a courtesy extended to us; jw.org's own Terms of Use grant it in writing. Our commitment to stop if a publisher asks is unchanged, and never depended on that sentence being softer than it should have been.

If you find another one

If something on this page does not match what the software does, tell us at support@comment.coach. It gets fixed, and it gets an entry here.