Ms Pressler is still alive, meaning that if she died today, the copyright on the diary would end in 2065.
2085 even. Most of the developed world has caved in and gone for Life+70.
But were the original manuscripts published? I have read material claiming that Anne Frankās original writings were quite different from what they became, but the articles seemed to be based on private research rather than publications.
Under US law, the mere act of fixing a work on paper would be sufficient to establish copyright, barring any considerations of registration or publication. Whether this applies in Netherlands law is hard to say, but the work was registered thereā¦ in Anneās name. Dutch copyright law is part of the Berne life + 70 regime, so it will tend to be more like current US law than it isnāt.
Dutch law does assign the copyright of manuscripts to the institutions holding them, but that seems to apply to their images rather than their contents. (Not a great law either way, IMHO.) That being said, the Anne Frank House does seem to have the manuscripts available for their use, so Ottoās emendations shouldnāt be a factor in any Urtext edition they put out.
The Foundation and the estate are trying to have it both ways, I think. The original publication was passed off for legal purposes as Anne Franksās own work. It is possibly legal to extend a claim for Ottoās co-authorship this long after the fact, given that the facts are provable - possibly legal, but the optics arenāt great. IANAL, so I wonāt claim the last word on that. However, if Ottoās contribution is provable, then the work does become a derivative edition of an original that has passed into the public domain because its author died 70 years ago.
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I donāt think Anne Frank is in a position to care much either way - itās not like she needs the money.
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Given that the neo-nazi position was that the diary was a forgery written by Otto Frank, I donāt think adding Otto Frank as co-author helps matters any.
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Would it be very wrong to start selling milk products out of my attic, under the name of āThe Dairy of Anne Frankā?
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Pretty sure they were, although only comparatively recently and more as a historical counterpart than a replacement.
I"ll go with thisā¦
I am not clear what you may be communicating with this.
Anyway, my point was simply that those who implement a central currency profit from itās use, regardless of who uses it for what. Invisibly mediating between exchanging parties empowers the mediator over the mediated. That is not to say that people should not use any money, or cannot do so as equals - but I think it would be prudent for people to be more careful which currencies they use.
It might be a bit of a tangent to the original post. But it is the presumption of transactionality which causes people to bother with copyright, commerce, and even property in the first place. It is far from being the only way to manage resources.
My mom visited the Anne Frank house and brought back another edition of her diary for me to read. There were a number of interesting facts about the book in there that Iāll share:
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She wrote it intending for it to be published. When she went into hiding, a competition was announced on the radio that they would publish a series of teen diaries after the war was over. So, it was written in order to be read and not just a totally private diary. She had two - one she was working on for the competition and one for her own self.
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In the version that did get published (originally for the series that Anne had heard about on the radio) her dad edited out some of the things related to her sometimes stormy relationship with her mother because at that time it was not common to discuss things like this about teenagers.
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He also edited out some of the bits about her relationship with Peter Van Pels, as this was also not common to discuss teen sexuality
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The book I read included some of the excerpted material and to me it made a big difference in showing her as a more relatable teenager.
Iām not sure if they have ever published the complete works. I think the main book that is read is the original edition that her father edited for the series that came out of that competition.
Even if they lose the copyright to the original book, it seems like they could continue to come out with scholarly editions based on the actual diaries.
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Of course the sad part is that by claiming that her father was āco-authorā of the diary they are playing into the hands of Holocaust deniers who claim that the book wasnāt written by Anne at all
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Of course the US only joined the āfixation grants copyrightā club with the copyright act of 1976, when we also joined the āLife +nnā term club. Under the previous law which certainly covers her diaries, the fixed* term starts when the work is published, So co authorship affects the term of the translated work not one whit.
In a real sense he CANāT possibly be the co-authorā¦Itās not like they worked together on this. Rather all of his editing work can only create a work that is a derivative of the original manuscript. And as has been pointed out by others, derivative works canāt extend the term of the original work.
There are also complicated issues with the Uraguay Round and US treatment of foreign copyrights.
*of course since Disney and others keep extending that fixed term, the copyright is effectively infinite.
Well, it does get interesting, though. We have a Swiss foundation claiming copyright on a Dutch-registered workā¦
Presumably the foundation is the heir or assignee of the copyright from Mr. Frank, who I assume* would have been Anneās heir irrespective of whether he was a co-author or notā¦
- since I know nothing of Dutch inheritance law.
And a little bit of reading shows that while the published version would be covered by the old law in the US, an unpublished manuscript (if we regard Mr Franks editing sufficient to create a separate, derivative work) would indeed be covered by the 1976 act in the US. Prior to that act, copyright was not available under federal law for unpublished works. Instead unpublished material relied on common-law protection at the state level.
Keep in mind that the rule for international copyright is ānational treatment,ā where treaty obliges a country to grant the same protection for foreign works that it grants to its own citizens. It is perfectly possible for material to be under copyright in one country and not another. eg Counter-Attack and Other Poems by Sigfried Sassoon which is in the public domain in the US but still protected within the UK.
afaik Otto Frank founded two organisations: The Anne Frank Foundation in the Netherlands maintaining the museum in Amsterdam and later - after he realised the publishing is profitable - the Swiss-based Anne Frank Fonds.
The latter is a charitable foundation and heir of Otto Frank, he wanted that they use the profits of the copyright until the term expires, after that time the organisation should be disbanded.
This 2014 article is interesting and explains the ābattleā between the two entities.
Today I read somewhere (Spiegel? Zeit?) that the Dutch organisation prepared a new edition of the diary for publishing in 2016 when the work is in the public domain. I fear only a few lawyers will get richā¦
And since in the US, the fixed term is 95 years from creation, rather than 70 years after deathā¦
itās the difference between 1947 (publication date) +95= 2042 versus 1980 (otto frankās death)+70=2050.
Europeans might be getting the shaft over this move, though.
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By National Lampoon no doubt.
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