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14 July 2015Copyright

Joseph Goebbels estate claims copyright win against Random House

The estate of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief during the Nazi regime, has won a copyright lawsuit against publisher Random House.

Handed down last week at the Munich District Court, the ruling means that the publisher will have to pay the estate royalties for using quotes from Goebbels’s diary.

Random House’s German division was sued in April this year for allegedly failing to pay a fee for using excerpts from the diary.

Goebbels served as minister for propaganda in Nazi Germany. His diaries, written from 1924 to 1945, remain protected by copyright until the end of 2015.

The disputed quotes feature in a biography of Goebbels written by Peter Longerich, a professor of German history. The biography was first published in Germany in 2010 by Random House and was republished in English by UK-based Penguin Random House, the umbrella company, earlier this year.

The Goebbels estate then sued Random House for not paying royalties related to either version.

At the time, Rainer Dresen, general counsel of Random House Germany, told the UK-based Guardian newspaper that he had suggested to the estate that if the company were to pay royalties then they should be donated to a Holocaust charity.

But Dresen also said that Cordula Schacht, the daughter of Adolf Hitler's former minister of economics Hjalmar Schacht and who brought the suit on behalf of the Goebbels estate, said that the royalties should go to the descendants of Goebbels’s four siblings.

Goebbels and his wife committed suicide in May 1945 after having their six children murdered.

Following the ruling in favour of the estate on Thursday, July 9, Random House is reportedly planning to appeal against the ruling to Germany’s Federal Court of Justice.

Random House told WIPR it had no further comment to make.

Dresen told news publication Newsweek that if the appeal is successful then other media organisations “could be examining” the royalties that they have been paying the Goebbels estate for using its copyright.

“Ideally, the courts will transfer the copyright to the Bavarian state, which would freely grant licences for scientific use,” he added.

Copyright ownership of Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf”, which was first published in 1925 and translates as “My Struggle”, was passed to the state of Bavaria at the end of World War II.

But the book is set to fall out of copyright as the ‘life pus 70 years’ term (copyright lasts for 70 years after the author’s death) is due to expire at the end of the calendar year.

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21 April 2015   The estate of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief during the Nazi regime, is suing publisher Random House for copyright infringement over use of his diary extracts.