Seventy years after Anne’s death, an academic and a French MP say the diary is public domain, despite objections from foundation set up by Otto Frank

An academic and a French MP have said they will go ahead with plans to publish the diary of Anne Frank online on Friday, despite the organisation holding publication rights threatening legal action.



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Olivier Ertzscheid, a lecturer at the University of Nantes, France, said the planned 1 January publication date in the diary’s original Dutch would be after the Diary of a Young Girl falls within public domain rules.

European copyright law dictates that a book become public domain on the first day of January 70 years after the author’s death.

Anne Frank died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Between 12 June 1942 and 1 August 1944, she wrote her red-and-white checked diary charting the time she spent in hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse until three days before her family was betrayed.

Her diary is one of the primary pieces of literature detailing life in Nazi-era Europe, with more than 30 million copies sold since its first publication in 1947.

Ertzscheid, who describes himself as a activist when it comes to public domain, called the pushback against publication “appalling”, adding that works such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will enter public domain on Friday.

The researcher had in October published on his website two French versions of the book, only to take them down after the Livre du Poche publisher sent a formal notice stating that copyright for translators was still in effect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Otto Frank, father of Anne, pictured in 1971 receiving the Golden Pan award for the sale of one million copies of her Diary of a Young Girl. Photograph: Dave Caulkin/AP

Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss charitable 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”.



The foundation told the AFP news agency that it had sent a letter threatening legal action if the diary was published.

It argues that the book is a posthumous work, for which copyright extends 50 years past the publication date, and that a 1986 version published by the Dutch State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) is under copyright until at least 2037.

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Yves Kugelmann, a member of the board of the foundation’s trustees, said earlier this year: “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. He typed over Anne Frank’s manuscripts and with scissors and glue subsequently literally ‘cut and pasted’ them into the version that was published in English from the early fifties.

“The book he created earns his own copyright. For the purposes of copyright, he is to be viewed as an ‘author’ of that version. Please note, again, that this does not imply that he ‘co-wrote’ anything.”

French parliament member Isabelle Attard also plans to publish the book in its original Dutch on 1 January. Her spokesperson had previously defended the move: “Saying now the book wasn’t written by Anne alone is weakening the weight it has had for decades, as a testimony to the horrors of this war.”

Attard has criticised the foundation’s move as a “question of money”, adding that if the work were in the public domain, Anne Frank would win “even more renown”.



Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.

