Diary comes out of hiding

Anne Frank's diary, written when the Jewish teenager was in hiding from the Nazis with her family, was made freely available online on Friday despite threats of legal action over copyright. A French MP and a university lecturer have published the original Dutch version of The Diary of a Young Girl on their websites 70 years after she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, aged 15. They argue that the work should now be free because under European law, copyright on written works expires 70 years after the author's death. However, the Anne Frank Fund argues that it still owns the publication rights. The Swiss-based charity was founded by Frank's father, Otto, and it claims that he made such significant changes to the manuscript that he "earnt his own copyright". Otto, who was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust, died in 1980. Yves Kugelmann, a member of the fund's board of trustees, said the words were Anne's, but after the war Otto Frank "merged, or compiled, the two versions of the diary that Anne Frank left, that were both incomplete and that partly overlapped, into one reader-friendly version. For the purposes of copyright, he is to be viewed as an 'author' of that version." The charity also maintains that the definitive version is one published in 1986 by the Dutch State Institute for War Documentation and therefore still remains under copyright. "Under Dutch copyright law, a work first published posthumously before 1995 remains protected for 50 years after the initial publication," the fund said in a statement on its website. It claims that a decision by a Dutch court last month confirmed that the book would remain covered by copyright. Bollocks to that. The words in the diary were Anne's words. Therefore, the copyright expired 70 years after HER death. We should not have to sieg heil (no pun intended) to the will of some stupid jerks who claim otherwise. Jokers like Kugelmann would fit better in ISIS.