Joseph Goebbels Estate Wins Copyright Suit Over Use Of Nazi's Diary In Biography

from the nazis-i-hate-these-guys dept

Decades later, the Nazis, or at least the estate of a long-dead Nazi, gets a win. In a case we had written about months ago, in which the estate of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels sued Random House Germany over the inclusion of quotes from Goebbels' diary, claiming copyright infringement, we raised the story up as an example of why fair use rights are necessary for the sake of scholarly work. The idea that the estate of an historical figure could censor, or even put up a toll booth, between history and those that would learn from it has to be about as good of an example of what the originators of copyright didn't want as any. The whole point was to proliferate knowledge and the arts. I'm not sure why a Nazi's diary should even be afforded such protections in any respects, nevermind the estate of the dead Nazi be allowed to control the dissemination of history in this way.

The German courts appear to disagree, however, having found in the favor of the Goebbels estate.

The Munich district court ruled in favor of the estate's claims, although it pointed out that the royalty rights to Goebbles' writings would expire at the end of 2015, 70 years after his death. Random House intends to appeal the case at the German Supreme Court. If it is successful, [Random House's attorney Rainer] Dresen says, other media organizations could be examining the royalties they have been paying the Goebbels estate for their publications. "The court's ruling would declare the estate's position null and void, necessitating refunds," he says.

As Mike noted in the last post, there are so very many arguments against why this ruling shouldn't have occurred. The first is that Germany ought to have something like Fair Use protections, which would have tossed this whole thing out immediately. Does Germany really want the estate's of historical figures to control historical scholarship in this way? Do we really need to trot out the whole "those who don't learn from history are deemed to repeat it" mantra?

And beyond that, it's not even clear that the Goebbel's Estate has the rights it's been selling anyway. When the US seized the original publishing house, it took control of the publishing rights for Mein Kampf, so why not Goebbels' diary as well? On top of that, it turns out Goebbels may have sold his own publishing rights to the Nazi regime, meaning the Bavarian government would now be the ownership party, not his estate. If that's the case, the Bavarian government is playing very, very dumb.

Dresen has pointed to evidence from a journal entry from 1936 when Goebbels sold the rights to Nazi state publishers. He believes this should transfer the copyright to the Bavarian government. "Bavaria is not interested," he told Newsweek, "'Show me the author's contract' they said, knowing the archives were destroyed at the war's end."

Either way, pending the appeal, count this as a loss for historical scholarly work. And from a court in a country that really, really should know better than this.

Filed Under: copyright, diary, germany, history, joseph goebbels, research
Companies: random house

Estate Of Joseph Goebbels Using Copyright To Demand Cash From New Biographer

from the that's-like-something-the-nazis...-oh-wait dept

Over the past few months, there have been a bunch of stories about the copyright status of Mein Kampf, with people fretting over the fact that the book is about to go into the public domain. The book, of course, was Adolf Hitler's manifesto, and while few people actually read it, in Germany it hasn't been published in decades. That's because the US seized the Nazis' publishing house, including its copyright in the book. It then gave that copyright to the state of Bavaria, which has used it to block the publication of Mein Kampf ever since. But, with Germany being a country where copyright is life+70, and seeing as Hitler died 70 years ago, on January 1, 2016, the book falls into the public domain (in the US, however, Houghton Mifflin apparently still retains the rights -- because nothing ever goes into the public domain here).

Either way, now there's another copyright dispute concerning a top Nazi: Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda. It turns out that while his copyrights also flip over into the public domain on January 1st of next year, a UK professor, Peter Longerich, just published a new biography of Goebbels, and Goebbels' heirs have come out of the woodwork to demand royalties, because the book quotes Goebbels' diaries.

Cordula Schacht – a lawyer whose own father, Hjalmar Schacht, was Hitler’s minister of economics – is suing Random House Germany and its imprint Siedler, over the book Goebbels, by Peter Longerich, professor of modern German history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Longerich, an authority on the Holocaust and Nazi era Germany, drew extensively on Goebbels’ diaries in his biography, which was published in Germany in 2010. Now those same passages from the diaries are set to appear in the English ­edition, which Penguin Random House UK and its imprint Bodley Head will publish on 7 May.

Most of the debate focuses on whether or not it is appropriate for money to "go to a war criminal," as Random House's top lawyer complains. There is also some discussion of who owns the copyright, as some believe that when the US seized the Nazis' publishing house and got the copyright on Mein Kampf, it also got the copyright on Goebbels' works.

Unfortunately, what's not discussed at all is how fair use should take care of a situation like this. Tragically for both Germany and the UK, neither have fair use. The UK does have a narrowly targeted "fair dealing" concept that likely does not cover this kind of scholarly publication.

Yet, this seems to show just why fair use is such an important concept. Being able to have academic experts properly quote historical source material in writing up biographies and other analyses of historical events and people seems like a no brainer for anyone hoping to properly study and record history. Using copyright to try to lock up such information (or to put a tollbooth on it) only serves to massively limit the ability of our society to accurately study and learn from history -- especially history as tragic as Nazi Germany.

Filed Under: adolf hitler, copyright, diaries, fair use, germany, joseph goebbels, peter longerich, public domain