The copyright for the German version is currently owned by Bavaria (some shady deal after the 2nd WW) and Mein Kampf is not published here.
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Thanks for the info! Copyright does not prevent a new translation because a translation is a creative âderivative workâ under copyright law. And someone could publish the German unless bavaria actually decided to sue as there is no âcopyright policeâ that slaps handcuffs on people.
It does not prevent translation, but I think the copyright holder of the original work can hinder publication?
All published version after 1945 of Mein Kampf (all languages) are afaik not official/legal as the Bavarian state never licensed the work.
Nobody could stop publication of a new translation - the exemption for creative work is pretty broad, and âcreativeâ means any intellectual activity that couldnât be done with a couple lines of Python.
Copyright of Derivative Works And Compilations
So if you translate a book to English and publish it in the US the original author has no legal means to stop you?
The translation is a new work that can be copyrighted, but I donât believe the US law about derivatives is so broad that a translation voids the copyrights of the original version completely.
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[quote=ârenke, post:25, topic:67648â]
So if you translate a book to English and publish it in the US the original author has no legal means to stop you?
[/quote]We often see multiple translations of the same work. But if someone publishes a novel, I would assume they apply for international copyrights. But there is no âcopyright policeâ just like there is no âpatent police.â People sue over minor similarities of books and movies, but I think book ideas get stolen internationally pretty often. For instance âOrdinary Peopleâ seems to be a ripoff of a French novel.
The translation of a screenplay could be done (badly) by software, so copyright would hold up for a literal translation. A translation of Mein Kampf would be a major original work of scholarship and a derivative work that does not infringe the original copyright that nobody would be willing to protect anyway.
âIt is crucial to have permission from the author, company, or individual that owns the copyright of the work you are translatingâ [0].
More or less how I understand copyright law within the constraints of the Berne convention, the whole discussion about âtranslations are derivative works with own copyrightâ, âfair useâ and âthreshold of originalityâ are needless diversions.
The Bavarian state doesnât license Hitlerâs work, afaik no translation done while Hitler was alive was licensed by him, so all published versions of his book are not legal (not sure if they do something about it outside of Germany).
I believe itâs stupid, but Bavaria believes it can destroy ideas with the help of copyright (it was even discussed if Mein Kampf should be declared illegal, but this was too idiotic even for our politicians).
American copyright laws lean towards free speech (including commercialization) much more than other countries. That is to say that they are much more generous in their definition of public domain and fair use. Canada basically came into line with US practices as a result of NAFTA.
I just read the German WP article about Mein Kampf: Hitlerâs publisher sold the right for UK and US in the 1930s, Random House (How are they called nowadays? Random Penguin or so?) is the current copyright owner for the English version.
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wrongful appropriation? Seems some wikipedian has a chip on his shoulder. Unless itâs a term of art, in which case, it should probably be explained.
Hitler died in 1945, so Mein Kampf will enter the public domain on 1 January 2016. The Bavarian goverment is not happy about this at all but there is little they can do about it apart from (a) getting the Federal government to pass a law that says the usual copyright law doesnât apply to Hitlerâs notorious book, or (b) getting a Disney-style general copyright term extension for everything, both of which are unlikely (and the German legislature has some bigger fish to fry, anyway).
In any case, Mein Kampf isnât actually banned in Germany â there have been no new copies printed after the war, but as every bride and groom in the Third Reich got one as a gift from the state on the occasion of their wedding and it was forbidden to sell or buy the book on the used-book market (in order to protect Hitlerâs income stream), there are stil loads of copies about, and it is perfectly legal to own one. And of course nowadays the book is fairly easy to find on the Internet.
All of which doesnât detract from the fact that Mein Kampf consists of very tedious prose that is difficult and boring to read nowadays (on top of the fact that its content is mostly stupid and obnoxious). It would probably be useful to turn people off Nazism in the way that reading the Bible cover-to-cover tends to turn people off Christianity. Making it hard to obtain just lends the book an air of mystery that makes it a lot more fascinating to certain circles than it deserves, but once they have it (as weâve said, not a real problem if you apply yourself) itâs not as if they could use it for light bedtime reading. For sure the people now protesting against Germany taking in foreign refugees donât carry copies of Mein Kampf in their pockets.
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If youâre going to translate it do second book as well so you can really get your hitler on.
(Yes his second book is called second book. Can take over half of europe but canât think of 2 book titles).
Yes, they are, but the Google watermarks are non-destructive overlays. You can remove them from the PDF sources if you know what youâre doing.
I have the second book in English, which is supposedly regarded as Hitlerâs work but there is very little mention of Hitler writing a 250 page manuscript. Probably most of it was written by Goebbels. Mein Kampf seems to have been a group project while Hitler and his posse were under what amounted to little more than house arrest after the Beer Hall Putsch. Anyway #2 is pretty dull. Hitler still wanted a truce with England, he ponders the âSouth Tyrolean questionâ and other current events, and there is a bit of bad mouthing of the Jews and Freemasons tacked on at the end.
That âpainterâ was rejected at the art school. He was not a student.
That rejection is one of Austriaâs greatest historic regrets. That, and the regrettable absence of modern German cars at the beginning of the 20th century.
And as for those other Austrian students⌠the âAustrian schoolâ of economics has been quite thoroughly disowned by Austrian politics. âNeoliberalismâ is one of the bogeymen that unite left-wing and a majority of the right-wing voters.
âPassing Hitler in the streetâ is a crime now?
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Of course they could, as the US is a signatory to the Berne Convention. There might be some exceptions for older works, as the US was not always a signatory, and I donât think all the provisions were applied retroactively.
There is no such thing as âapplying for international copyrightsâ. You hold a copyright whenever you create something copyrightable.
Current English translations are probably still under copyright and might be for some time to come. However, the only basis for preventing people from making new translations is the Bavarian stateâs copyright in the original, which expires at the end of this year.
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An interesting development in an important case. I take exception with one comment in the article:
[quote=âdoctorow, post:1, topic:67648, full:trueâ]
[Read the post]The aggregate value of all the copyrighted Web-pages theyâve indexed certainly exceeds the value of all the books ever printedâŚ[/quote]
This sounds incredible, whether weâre looking in economic terms or in terms of recognized value to humanity. Nearly every literate educated person for the last several hundred years owes it to printed books in myriad form and language. Adjusted for inflation, the total economic activity must be enormous and dwarf anything web-based print has accomplished in these past twenty-six years since the initial development of the World Wide Web in 1989.
Iâll tell you what, if the grid collapses or information and culture are altered and interfered with from the top in a networked digital medium, I for one am going to be grateful the bulk of humanityâs knowledge and information is in paper form. If longevity-for-cost is a metric of technology, books are still more advanced than any digital print storage medium in widespread use today.
Finally, somethingâs been nagging at me badly with digital print medium and digital media in general. What does your family inherit when you die? What does identity even mean when the things that are important to you are stored in some corporate database and are wiped out when your account ends, and in the meantime, itâs occasionally perused and evaluated/judged for other purposes by hackers, the corporation, and the government?
Anyway, kudos to Google I think-- particularly with respect books and editions that have not been reprinted or published in over 25 years; lots of things are essentially abandoned and lost to the Internet; what theyâre is accomplishing by indexing it is important for lots of reasons. Ditto with their searchable scanned newsprint. We have to know the past to understand the present, etc⌠Itâs nice if that can be accomplished without research trips to multiple far-flung libraries.
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Well people that adhere to Austrian School economics to the point of idolizing von Mises tend to be raging xenophobes, yes itâs a crime for them. These are the same people that think the Frankfurt School are secretly running the world.
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I thought it was a euphemismâŚ
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