Brenda Cronin, Wall Street Journal; Nancy Drew Cracks the Case of Copyright After 95 years, the earliest adventures in the mystery book series are now free for public use.
"Nancy Drew has survived some scary situations. But the slender, attractive sleuth has just entered the most hair-raising of all: the public domain.
On New Year’s Day, 95 years of copyright protection under U.S. law expired on the first four books in Carolyn Keene’s mystery series about the fictional detective."
"A German publisher of right-wing books has begun selling a reprint of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” originally issued in 1943 by the Nazi party’s central publishing house, a move that risks violating Germany’s law against the distribution of Nazi propaganda. A copyright on “Mein Kampf” that was held by the Bavarian government expired on Dec. 31, and an annotated scholarly edition was published this year with government permission. Now, state prosecutors in the German city of Leipzig, where the publisher, Der Schelm, is based, are investigating whether they can press charges . Last week, prosecutors in Bamberg opened a separate investigation after a bookseller, who was not identified, advertised Der Schelm’s edition. Although Hitler’s two-volume treatise, written from 1924 to 1927 and laying out his ideas on race and violence, is widely available on the internet, the annotated version is the only one that is legal in Germany. The 3,500 comments accompanying the text provide context for the work, and they are aimed, in part, at trying to prevent a new generation from taking up Nazi ideologies. “Promoting an edition without annotations is considered a criminal offense,” Christopher Rosenbusch, a spokesman for prosecutors in Bamberg, said on Wednesday."
