Here's an interesting use of copyright for all of those who track its (ab)use for political reasons. In Poland, publisher Marek Skierkowski is being investigated on behalf of the state of Bavaria for infringing on its copyright on the works of Adolf Hitler.
The case is the following: The publisher, who has no history of neo-Nazi sympathizing, decided to publish Mein Kampf purely for commercial reasons. Now, Poland -- like many other countries in Europe -- has a law criminalizing distribution of fascist propaganda (?246 of Polish criminal code). However, the publisher could convince the state attorney that Mein Kampf does not constitute current political propaganda, but has to be viewed as a historic document and that making it accessible would serve historic and scientific purposes, not the least because he is clearly not politically motivated. Since he does not try to convince anyone of any political views, his publication do not constitute propaganda, so the reasoning of the attorney. What does this have to do with copyright and Bavaria? After WWII, the state of Bavaria was given by the allies all the copy- and author's rights belonging to Hitler, because he was officially registered as a Munich resident by the end of the war. And now, Bavaria tries to use its copyrights to stop the publication in Poland after the application of national criminal law failed to do so. Bavaria holds the copyrights for another ten years (70 years after the death of the author) after which it falls into the public domain. Source: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361691,00.html ----+-------+---------+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
