Famous Holocaust story of Anne Frank now free for academic research after court’s repeal Anne Frank Fonds foundation’s attempts to extend copyright to give royalties to charity.
Copyright across much of Europe expires 70 years after an author’s death, but the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation established by her father Otto Frank in 1963, informed French publishers in October that the diaries would not be entering the public domain on 1 January 2016 because Otto, who died in 1980, had done so much work on the most widely published version that he had “earned his own copyright”.
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Isabelle Attard, a French MP who is preparing to publish the Dutch text online on 1 January, warns that this argument dilutes the impact of the diaries.
Isabelle Attard, a French MP whose grandparents died in the Holocaust, published the entire Dutch text of the diary on Friday, the French news agency AFP reported.
Separately, Olivier Ertzscheid, a lecturer at the University of Nantes, published the text on his website the same day.
“The intimate diary, written in a secret apartment in Amsterdam by a Jewish teenager, born German but stripped of her nationality, has finally entered the public domain, ” Attard said in a statement on her website. “Seventy years after the author’s death, the whole world can use, translate and interpret these works, and use them to create new ones.”
Frank’s diary, which chronicles two years of hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, may be the most famous Holocaust-era document and has inspired several play and film adaptations. Anne died in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp.
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