Recently, many articles have been written about The Diary of Anne Frank, a story from the perspective of a young, dutch girl who grew up in hiding from the Naxis force in Germany during WWII. Anne Frank, the “author” of her diary, died in 1945, which means the book should fall into public domain at the end of 2015.

However, the Anne Frank Fund, the “owner” of the copyright, is disputing its length of protection. The Anne Frank Fund (AFF) is a charitable organization created by Anne’s father, Otto Frank. Otto made the organization the universal heir of him and his daughter, so the org “owns” every copyrightable thing created by the pair.

Originally, the copyright argument was that Otto, the father, was a co-writer of the story, because he claimed to have written the prologue and epilogue and contributed to the story. As a joint writer, the protection clock would start counting down 70 years from the death of the last living author. Otto died in 1980, so his protection should continue until 2050. The problem is that in order to be a joint work you must plan to be a joint work from the beginning of the creation. I highly doubt that Otto and Anne decided to write her diary together as co-authors, fully aware of its future popularity as a novel and the necessary intellectual property protections.

Another route around the public domain, is to argue that the original work by Anne Frank has been improved and transformed into a new work or compilation. A compilation is like a “Best Of” album, that can be resold as a separate work. AFF argues that Otto created a Best Of version of the book, and maintains copyright protection for his new work. A compilation would have been created later and the Diaries would have a longer protection.

On the AFF website, there is answers to questions about the copyright, such as “Why is AFF the copyright holder of the Diaries?”, “Who wrote the Diary of Anne Frank?”, and my favorite, “How can I ensure that I am not infringing the Diaries’ rights?”. They say that Anne was the sole author of the Diaries, and there are many versions that will be protected past 2015. The website has links that lead you to other articles that confirm the extension of protection, but based on when the manuscripts were published.

So they dropped the dad’s argument and decided that the length of protection should be based on when the Diary was published to the masses, not the death of the author.  Since the works were published in 1986 after the death of the author, Dutch law grants 50 years of protection, ending in 2037. This Dutch Law will likely be increased to 70 years to match up with other countries after the TPPA is passed.

This policy of calculating from the date of publication or creation was created to cover works where the death of the artist was not definite or maybe the work was not published and marketed until after the death of the artist. In U.S. law, the author gets 70 years of protection after death,  95 from the date of publication, or 120 from the date of creation. This gave the right holders every chance to effectively proof with some certainty the actual date the clock begins to tick. It’s not meant to be a system to shop for the longest protection possible, or to avoid public domain like a disease.

The AFF website makes sure to inform the reader that just because they will sue you, does not mean you cannot buy rights to the book or its many versions. I wonder if Anne ever thought that her daily, private notes would be read by millions, some in classrooms and libraries. However, I’m almost sure she would not have intended her inspirational story to require a license and fee. Once again, statute has crippled the Public Domain.