Anne Frank’s Diary Gains ‘Co-Author’ in Copyright Move | Hacker News Reader

Anne Frank’s Diary Gains ‘Co-Author’ in Copyright Move

nytimes.com

56 pointsNameNickHN51 comments

>"The move has a practical effect: It extends the copyright from Jan. 1, when it is set to expire in most of Europe, to the end of 2050. Copyrights in Europe generally end 70 years after an author’s death. Anne Frank died 70 years ago at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, and Otto Frank died in 1980. Extending the copyright would block others from being able to publish the book without paying royalties or receiving permission." (from nytimes article in OP) //

Mr Frank of course has rights over the work he produced, but anything that Anne wrote will be out of copyright. Works representing the output of multiple persons needn't be treated atomically AFAIA.

As a thought experiment: Something I find curious is what law - other than trespass - would prevent someone from getting hold of the original work and publishing it verbatim, it wouldn't be a copyright infringement; I'm not sure it can truly be considered to theft. The criminal liability for entering and taking photos of a work that is out of copyright should rightly be very minor, the tort of trespass seems to be all that could be sued for.

If this stands the precedent set will surely see editors, typesetters and others claiming co-authorship of works such as out-of-copyright books and causing a further malevolent erosion of the public domain.

Why wouldn't publishing the book's contents in full under a different name and title be copyright infringement?

Because the original "book," by Anne Frank, would be in the public domain.

Then there's no point to their action, because it would still be public domain even after their attempt to steal it.

Because the copyright on anything that Anne Frank has written will expire this year.

The diary itself will be out of copyright, the book "The Diary of Anne Frank" - an edited version of the diary (by excision and addition of preface only, it seems) - will still be in part copyright protected.

Except possibly in some regions - I think France has an ongoing right to be named as author/creator of your own works - once copyright expires then you could plagiarise the work without committing a legal wrong; though it would be morally reprehensible IMO.

If I understand the situation correctly the physical diaries and notebooks are owned by a different organization (The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) than the owner of the copyrights (Anne Frank Fonds in Basel). And the former are unhappy about this latest development, so that may well happen.

Sickening to see her legacy soiled like this for what seem to be purely commercial reasons. "This is not about the money"... sure, what is it about then?

The most effective countermeasure would be to publish the actual diary, un-edited, ink stains and all without any further polishing or changing.

I also think that would be a much more powerful document than the interpreted one.

I'm not sure "commercial" is quite fair, since all the money goes to a charitable foundation. This is still clearly a misuse of copyright, but their intentions may actually be noble.

Edit: I haven't said anything that wasn't strictly factual. Please don't downvote me because you mistakenly think I was defending copyright abuse.

They are about to lose their jobs and/or relevance.

What happens to the money is less important than that her book is free to read for everybody, it's a very important historical document, especially given the rise of the new right wing element in Europe.

This is not the first time there is financial controversy around the diary, the last time a lot of money changed hands to be able to show an additional 5 pages.

Note that the people in charge of the foundation never said that this was to make sure the foundation would still receive funds, they claimed the opposite, this was not about the money, this was about 'protecting Anne Frank'. I fear that she's very much beyond needing any such protection. Citation from the article:

"“When she died, she was a young girl who was not even 16. We are protecting her. That is our task.”"

Every institution, over time, seems to morph so that the perpetuation of that institution becomes its top priority, even at the expense of the mission it was founded to serve.

What could be a better charity than putting the work in the public domain?

Life-saving food and medical supplies? I mean, I'm not saying that putting the book in the public domain will cut off major charitable funding, but you needn't be quite so flip.

By that reasoning we should rescind the public domain and re-assign all copyright to charitable foundations.

Sure, but I sincerely hope our life-saving food and medical supply is not utterly dependent on people putting money into cultural touchstones. Seems like combining two radically different things.

Would be interesting to know how much money is left for charities after paying the swiss based infrastructure. There FAQ sounds more like Disney then Anne Frank.

The Dutch Anne Frank Stichting has a public page on where their money goes and annual reports but the Swiss foundation does not (I searched their website and could not locate anything resembling financial statements for the past years, but I may have missed them).

Maybe we'll get lucky and some curator, fed up with all the copyright nonsense, will just release a bunch of cameraphone snaps.

I'd host them. Or the torrent if it came to that.

It's also about having a means for giving a legal smackdown on Holocaust denialists who are itching for the material to come out of copyright so they can chop it up to produce their own material.

That's also why Disney does everything they can to keep copyright on works they explicitly do not allow to be displayed outside their control. For example, "Song of the South" is a huge embarrassment for Disney, and the copyright means they can allow only scholars to exhibit the whole movie.

They're still wrong to do it, but it's not just about the money.

It's not as if idiots won't do what idiots do. Holocaust deniers can go f* themselves and they're perfectly capable of chopping up the diary today if they want to, if the law of the land isn't stopping them from being Holocaust deniers then copyright certainly won't mean much. I say let them, it won't do them any good and it will in fact show the world even better what they are made of. If all that stands between people believing them is copyright law then we have much bigger problems.

A credible threat of being bankrupted in a lawsuit has kept many of those cockroaches under a rock where they belonged, and for a long time. Otto Frank himself sued one guy.

Anne Frank's legacy has been the subject of many lawsuits over the years. To date it has all been either about money or control of content that none of the participants created. Otto Frank was using what tools he had to achieve his ends, and he did a pretty good job of it, I have never had the feeling that he did not do anything short of giving his life to put the legacy of his daughter out there for the world to see in the way he deemed the best possible.

But with Otto Frank now many years dead and the link with the living past fading I think the time has come to reveal the diary as it was made, rather than as it was interpreted to limit the fall-out for other living people whose sensibilities might have been offended by Anne's razor sharp pen.

I'm sure there will be people that will abuse that, but the good and the bad need to be weighed and in my opinion at least the good of a public domain version of the book far outstrips the possible bad that could come of this.

That was done years ago. "Anne Frank - The Definitive Edition" was published in 1997, and contains the material Otto Frank censored (nothing particularly surprising - it was the 1950's, and not at all a surprise that he would not release paragraphs about Anne's sexual feelings). It also has references on just what came from where (Anne did not just use one notebook) and what languages she used (she wrote in several. Otto Frank first translated it all into Dutch. His manuscript was what went out for translation in other languages).

Again, it's readily available. Keeping the copyright is something they're doing to prevent bad actors from trying (again) to harness the power of stupid people in large numbers.

It's their word against the Anne Frank Stichting at this point. And their word is not 'we are doing this to prevent bad actors from trying to harness the power of stupid people in large numbers'. Their words are that they are 'protecting Anne Frank'.

As for stupid people in large numbers: that's precisely why the message should be available to all. It is stupid people in large numbers that are about to vote Geert Wilders to become the first ultra-nationalist right-wing MP of the Netherlands and all that without being able to carve up Anne Franks diary to their liking.

I note that if they really were altruistic in their motives they could easily get the unrest they created go by waving their fees and permitting the distribution of other versions by specific parties under special license without letting go of the copyright in order to be able to challenge would-be carver-uppers.

Again: it IS available to all. There's bound to be a copy of the definitive edition in your local library.

So if you're slightly embarrassed about something it shouldn't be public domain?

Just showing that using copyright to suppress something is not new.

I beg of you: do not allow anyone to inherit your copyrights. This naked profiteering by the descendants of the deceased has happened time and time again. Consider the case of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 'I Have A Dream' speech cannot be printed in full in textbooks, because his estate charges $10 to read it. A speech that was written to be performed publicly.

Anne Frank was not in a position to do much about who inherited her copyrights.

Of course. But her father was.

The argument here is that he set up that Swiss foundation specifically to protect her legacy, it is the administrators of the foundation that try to make him a co-author here, not Otto Frank himself. He did not claim to be her co-author so he wasn't in a position to do anything about this either, merely trying to do what he thought was best, and now that group of 'managers' has made a turn-about because they were about to become irrelevant.

Sure, and we probably needed to make the mistakes we made to realize how dangerous it is. Hopefully her father would have made a different decision these days. Public domain is extremely powerful.

Did MLK say he wanted it freely redistributed? He delivered the speech publicly. Where does the MLK estate's money go to? Does it go to his heirs, or to the foundation activities?

While this move is questionable, it highlights a justice dilemma with the current copyright term practice of death of author + x years. Especially when arguing that that the descendants should benefit from the works of an author, now it is effectively so, that relatives of someone who got murdered (possibly even because of their works) are in terms of copyright worse off than someone who did not, just because of their date of death. There should be some clause that has either publication of work + x years or birth date + x + plus average life expectancy.

At least France has such a special clause of plus 30 years for people who fought and died for the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_pour_la_France#cite_note-...

Why is it not considered fraud to advertise the book as being written by Ms. Frank, only to claim another author decades later? They seem to both have their cake and eat it too.

I find it especially galling as the co-author died never claiming to be the author.

In 67 years time Tom Clancy's third cousin's son no doubt will suddenly appear as a co-author of his books just as they go out of copyright ...

Isn't one of the main beliefs of holocaust deniers that Anne Frank didn't actually write the diary, and that it was actually written by her father? I thought the Anne Frank Foundation had been denying this for decades...

Anne's dad re-arranged and censored some parts of it and wrote an introduction. It's pretty much required reading here in schools (or at least, it was when I was a kid).

I guess consistency isn't the Anne Frank Foundation's strong point.

> Anne's dad re-arranged and censored some parts of it and wrote an introduction.

Right, that's what they had said, but now they seem to be saying that that's no longer true. To quote the NYT article:

"But now the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to 'The Diary of Anne Frank' is alerting publishers that her father is not only the editor but also legally the co-author of the celebrated book. [...] 'If you follow their arguments, it means that they have lied for years about the fact that it was only written by Anne Frank.'"

It would make sense that the father might have some claim to a copyright on the version he edited, but it looks like they are saying that he was the co-author on the supposedly unedited version also.

Their arguments - both past and present - are inconsistent and I'd be more than happy to contribute to a lawsuit testing that assumption. This really should not fly, it makes me very upset.

This reminds me of the lawsuit a few years ago where Scientologists tried to sue some folks for publishing their internal documents online, and the folks publishing them said that Scientology didn't own the copyrights since both the documents and the 'church' claimed they were written by Xenu.

That was right here in Amsterdam. Karin Spaink and xs4all vs Scientology. She's one of my heroes. The case you refer to is 'the Fishman affidavits'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Spaink

We were at VOLMAC in the same year, but I highly doubt she would remember that.

http://kspaink.home.xs4all.nl/fishman/home.html

Talk about abuse of copyright, that was one of the worst ever.

As Elie Wiesel, another distinguished Holocaust author, put it: Some events do take place but are not true; others are – although they never occurred.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book)

(I'm not sure if Otto Frank's co-authorship falls into the first or second category.)

> Anne's dad re-arranged and censored some parts of it and wrote an introduction.

That's editing, not authoring.

Their high-priced lawyers seem to think otherwise.

It's so important to be able to profit from genocide.

Sure. But Anne Frank is the wrong target here.

What about apologetic memoirs of active perpetrators or works of propagandists?

Albert Speer † 1981; Fritz Hippler † 2002; Leni Riefenstahl † 2003

Despicable.

Link should be to the much more informative http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/books/anne-frank-has-a-co-... , which this article points to.

Thanks. Changed from http://time.com/4113855/anne-frank-diary-co-author/.

Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article on the subject: https://torrentfreak.com/anne-frank-scandal-an-underreported...

Relevant quote:

> What’s really infuriating about this is how oldmedia doesn’t call it out as fraud at all, but takes a completely neutral stance. Most outlets seem to be rewrites of the New York Times story, which just neutrally reports “the book now has a co-author”, quotes a few people in the worst form of abdicative “he-said-she-said journalism”, and leaves it at that.

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