Appeals
court judges said Het Parool violated
the copyright to "The Diary of Anne
Frank," which is held by the Basel,
Switzerland-based Anne Frank Funds, an
organization that also holds commercial
rights to the diarist's
image. http://www.newsday.com/ap/rnmpin0c.htm Paper
Loses Anne Frank Dispute By WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated
Press Writer AMSTERDAM,
Netherlands (AP)
--
An Amsterdam
newspaper broke copyright laws by
publishing newly discovered pages of
Anne Frank's diary, an appeals
court has ruled, ordering the paper to
print a front-page apology. Friday's ruling against the daily
Het Parool overturned an earlier
district court decision that the paper had
done nothing wrong by publishing excerpts
from new diary entries within days of
their surprise discovery last August. Appeals court judges said Het Parool
violated the copyright to
"The Diary of
Anne Frank," which is held by
the Basel, Switzerland-based Anne Frank
Funds, an organization that also holds
commercial rights to the diarist's image.
The court said the newspaper illegally
encroached on the Swiss group's claims to
the young Jewish diarist's best-selling
account of hiding from the Nazis. In a public apology Friday, Het
Parool acknowledged it had printed
pages "which hadn't been made public
earlier" and did so without permission
from the Anne Frank Funds. Calls to the Swiss organization went
unanswered Saturday. It was not immediately clear whether
the appeals court also would rule on
similar complaints brought by the Anne
Frank Funds against the Dutch makers of a
new documentary film about the girl and
against Melissa Muller, the German
author of a new book on the teen-age
diarist. Both of those projects quote at
length from the new pages without
permission. The pages caused a sensation when they
surfaced last summer, when longtime Frank
family confidant Cor Suijk revealed
that Anne's father, Otto Frank,
gave him five handwritten sheets shortly
before he died in 1980. In the pages, Anne bitterly criticizes
what she saw as her parents' nearly
loveless marriage.
Scholars
speculate that her father withheld those
pages to spare the family
embarrassment. Het Parool printed excerpts on
Aug. 26, and a few days later posted the
pages on its Internet site. Within weeks,
the Anne Frank Funds slapped the paper
with a copyright infringement suit. Het Parool argued it had broken
no copyright rules because the pages
ordinarily would have been published as
part of the diary if Frank hadn't kept
them separate from the rest of the
manuscript. Their sheer newsworthiness
also justified publication, the newspaper
said. Anne's diary documents the difficulties
she and her family endured while hiding
from the Nazis in an Amsterdam canal house
from July 1942 until they were betrayed in
the fall of 1944. Anne died of typhus in
the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp just weeks before it
was liberated in the spring of 1945. Her diary, which was published
posthumously, has been translated into
more than 50 languages and has sold
millions of copies worldwide. [Anne
Frank Index] |