I do of course wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion that European copyright law should be more unified, understandable and clear. To begin with: always 70 years after the death of the author (or 70y after anon. publ.) & freedom of panorama in all countries.

I find it extremely unlikely that Otto Frank’s heirs will claim his co-authorship in court, hence I maintain that version C is in the public domain in most of the world. At most he can claim special “critical edition” rights, which e.g. in Italy are 20 years from publication.

I do agree on the main point of your campaign of course, which is about version A and B. But I urge you to avoid hasty claims about the 1947 edition.

By the way, it would be great to have a scan of the 1947 edition (a few copies exist in European libraries) and also to know when the German translator died. I wish her to have lived long but she was already 75 years old when the translation was published. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Sch%C3%BCtz

The text removed from WikiSource was the diary as first published in the Netherlands in 1947 (‘version C), which will not be public domain in the United States until 2042. The decision of the US-based Wikimedia Foundation to remove the text from WikiSource was solely based on its copyright status in the USA. It is not connected to the claim that Otto Frank has copyright over ‘Version C’ of Anne Frank’s diary.

That claim is not as uncontested as the blogpost suggests, and as far as I know has not yet been upheld by any court. Several experts on the writings of Anne Frank dismiss it, stating that the contribution of Otto Frank was not substantial enough to merit copyright. If they are right, Anne Frank’s diary as first published in 1947 became public domain in the Netherlands on 1 January 2016 after all…..

And yes, harmonisation of copyright in the EU is long overdue!