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It's World IP Day! Celebrate by making money from a dead teenager

Let's be frank, Anne Frank

It's World Intellectual Property day! So it's time again to think about the plight of IP lawyers, tens of thousands of whom are forced to undergo the daily indignity of people shaking their heads at them as they try to explain why everything in the world, including your own thoughts, are owned by someone else and you should pay a licensing fee to be allowed access to them.

To celebrate this hallowed day, the good folk at Polish digital education organization Centrum Cyfrowe have decided to highlight the absurdity of current copyright laws and how people continue to profit from the death of a German-born teenager 75 years ago. They have published The Diary of Anne Frank.

But only in Dutch. And you are only allowed to read it if you are in Poland, thanks to what can charitably be described as a shambolic mess.

"One of the most iconic literary works of the 20th century is The Diary of Anne Frank ('Het Achterhuis' in Dutch)," says Centrum Cyfrowe.

"It should have become part of the public domain in 2016, because the copyright in the work should have expired. However, as of today the diary is only in the public domain in a few countries, including Poland. In most other European countries, the well-known work remains restricted under copyright."

Cyfrowe continues: "We call upon European legislators to end the absurdity that has led to this situation. The Diary should be a powerful part of our collectively shared public domain. Instead, the fragmented, varied rules about the duration of copyright across Europe has made the work inaccessible to so many potential readers. We call for the harmonization (and preferably, shortening) of copyright terms. And geo-blocking – in which access to content is determined based on the location of the user – needs to end."

Copyright lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years (a figure that itself keeps growing as lawyers realize they can continue to make money from famous works). Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

Rules, rulez

Her death created the unfortunate situation where it may no longer have been possible to profit from her writing 70 years later, so IP lawyers hit on the idea of trademarking the name "Anne Frank's Diary" and adding her father as a co-author so the protections extend to 2051.

Fortunately, there is also a special rule that says for posthumous publication, copyright extends 50 years past the date of publication. That rule was actually phased out over 20 years ago, but prior rights were retained, so two of the three versions of Anne Frank's diary (called A and B) will receive copyright protection until 2036 since they were published in 1987. At least, that is, in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

All makes perfect sense, see.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Supreme Court is discussing another glorious form of IP protection: patents.

It is a case on the rather unsatisfactory existence of so-called patent trolls – shell companies that use a patent that should never have been approved to bully corporations into handing over money or risk being dragged through the IP courts.

The transcript from Monday's hearing on Cuozzo Speed Technologies vs Michelle K. Lee – Lee being the person in charge of the patent and trademark office (PTO) – threw up this gem from Justice Stephen Breyer:

The Patent Office has been issuing billions of patents that shouldn't have been issued;­ I overstate, but only some.

The case is in fact over legislation passed in 2011 in an effort to unravel the disastrous open-door patent policy that held for some time at the PTO. The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act allows companies to go direct to the PTO and ask for a patent to be cancelled, rather than have to wait for a lawsuit to be filed and then challenge it through the (long and expensive) court system.

Somewhat incredibly, Congress passed this law without actually specifying what the standard should be for assessing whether a patent should stand or be cancelled.

Why didn't any of the many, many IP lawyers swirling around Washington catch that before it became law? It's impossible to say. But if you want an opinion, they'd be happy to bill you for it.

Happy IP Day! ®

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