Anne Frank was a teenager who is now known the world over for her diary of life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. She died in February or March 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where was she held, shortly before it was liberated. Since the applicable term of copyright in the EU is 70 years after the death of a writer, this means that her famous diary should now be in the public domain.

That is the supposed deal of copyright: in return for a time-limited monopoly enforced by the state, a protected work passes into the public domain after the copyright term expires, after which it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose.

So why isn't The Diary of a Young Girl free now? The answer to that question reveals the patchwork nature of copyright in the EU, and the absurdly long duration that makes it unsuited for a digital world where sharing and reuse is the norm.

The situation is complicated by the existence of three versions of the diary, generally referred to as versions A, B, and C. Version A is the original set of diary entries, and version B is Anne's reworking of the material as a novel, which she hoped she would be able to publish after the war.

The best-known version is version C, which was published in 1947 by Anne's father Otto. It was compiled by him from the other two versions. After his death in 1980, the copyright for Anne's writings passed to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Switzerland-based foundation. The Anne Frank Fonds claims that Otto Frank should be considered a coauthor of the version C text , which means that it would remain in copyright until 2051, though this has not yet been tested in the courts.

That leaves the status of versions A and B. They were published posthumously and are therefore subject to special rules. A post on a new site dedicated to exploring the copyright issues surrounding the diary explains the situation:

The special rules were phased out in the mid-1990s, when copyright regulation was updated in the EU. However, transitional provisions said that any rights that had previously existed would continue to remain in effect. Therefore, because version A and version B were only first published in 1987, they’ll receive copyright protection in the countries that had adopted the special rule until 2036.

The Netherlands is one of the countries that adopted the special rules, implying that versions A and B will be protected until 2036. The Anne Frank Fonds has already brought one case as a result of this situation; in 2015 it sued the Huygens Institute of the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Netherlands and the Anne Frank House, accusing them of violating its copyrights by carrying out textual and historical research on Anne Frank's manuscripts, which are held by the Anne Frank House on loan from the Dutch state.

That's rather surprising, since the stated aim of the Anne Frank Fonds is "to disseminate the diary as a basis for educational work in the spirit of the founder" and academic research would seem to be a good way of doing that. The Amsterdam district court ruled in favour of the Anne Frank House and the Huygens Institute, though that was for academic research: simple republication of the texts of versions A and B would not be allowed, in the Netherlands at least.

Poland is one of the EU countries where the posthumously published versions of the diary are unequivocally in the public domain. As a result, the Polish digital education organisation Centrum Cyfrowe has been able to put those versions online for everyone to read—well, maybe not everyone: "unless you’re in Poland, you won’t be able to access the online version of the diary. Why? Because EU copyright law only permits publication of the diary in countries where it is in the public domain. For now, the diary will remain geoblocked, and only visible to users access it from within Poland."

Centrum Cyfrowe is hoping to use this ridiculously complicated situation to call attention to the mess that is EU copyright:

We’re saddened that the online version of The Diary of a Young Girl cannot be more widely shared. We believe that it should be a part of the global public domain and freely accessible to everyone who wants to read and experience this important cultural work. We call upon European legislators to end the absurdity that has led to this situation. The diary should be a powerful part of our collectively-shared public domain. Instead, the fragmented, varied rules about the duration of copyright across Europe has made the work inaccessible to so many potential readers. We call for the harmonisation (and preferably, shortening) of copyright terms. And geoblocking—in which access to content is determined based on the location of the user—needs to end.

The European Commission has said that it would "initiate action to put an end to unjustified geo-blocking" as part of its proposals to update copyright. It's probably too much to hope that addressing the kind of copyright mess described above would be part of that. Which means waiting a few more decades before Anne Frank's diary finally enters the public domain for everyone in the EU.