Copyright wars

The controversy over the copyright on Anne Frank's diary comes at a point when copyright laws have been subject to intense debates

I hope to tell you everything that I could never tell anyone until now, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." This is the sentence with which Anne Frank began her diary; in two months' time, her book, perhaps the most beloved of all of the writings from the Holocaust, would have come into the public domain.

But this Friday, the Switzerland-based Anne Frank Foundation made a renewed and troubling claim on the copyright to Anne Frank's diary, which will have major consequences for the publishing industry.

Copyrights in Europe usually end 70 years after the death of the author; it was 70 years ago that Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, just weeks after the liberation. The Basel-based foundation claims that Otto Frank, Anne's father, is the legal author. Otto Frank died in August 1980, so if their claim stands, the Foundation will retain the copyright to Anne Frank's diary to the end of 2050 in Europe or at least to 2030, depending on which section of the complex copyright law will apply. (In the United States, which grants copyright for 95 years from the date of first publication, the foundation retains copyright for the diary up to 2052.)

Reactions were predictably strong around the world: many were angered that the Foundation would try to present Otto Frank, who edited the diary and never claimed authorship himself when he was alive, as a co-author. Cory Doctorow, science-fiction author who has studied copyright and public domain extensively, wrote a strong piece explaining why it would be dangerous to set a precedent including editors as "co-proprietors".

"The question of giving copyright protection to editors undermines the rights of authors," he said. "If my editors are co-proprietors of all my works, then they get the right to trump how I may use those words." These are serious concerns, and will be shared by authors around the world, not just in Europe.

The controversy over the copyright on Anne Frank's diary comes at a point when copyright laws and fair use have been subject to intense, sometimes fevered, debates. At the crux of the debates is the issue of whether copyright laws are being employed for the benefit of authors and other kinds of creators, for readers who have much to gain from improvements in fair use laws and public domain sharing, or for publishers and other companies in, say, the music industry.

Many argue that the copyright laws - specifically the extension of rights beyond the death of the author to 50 or 70 years - have blocked the entry of works into the public domain. Slow expiry of copyright has meant, for instance, that no new books entered the US public domain in 2015 and, according to some advocates, will not enter the public domain until 2019, when the copyrights on some classics expire.

In the United Kingdom, conversely, the Green Party's proposal to limit copyright on works to a renewable term of 14 years met with angry protests from authors, including Philip Pullman and Linda Grant, who pointed out that this would squeeze the already slender income of most authors. (Some revised versions of this proposal suggest, instead, that copyright should expire 14 years after the death of the author, which seems a shade more reasonable.)

Perhaps the most prominent example of copyright strangulation concerns Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech, "I Have a Dream", which cannot be used in its original phrasing by film makers or documentary makers without the consent of his heirs. King's estate has sued CBS in the past for unauthorised use of the speech. Another infamous example comes from Nina Paley's "Sita Sings the Blues", where the film maker discovered that while the recordings of the songs (recorded by Annette Hanshaw) were not under copyright, the compositions were.

It took Paley years to sort out that tangle, and it remains a classic example of how laws that are supposed to protect authors' rights can drastically curb creativity. As countries from Japan to India join in the heated UK and US debates, a more sensible approach to copyright is overdue.

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