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.