Anne Frank’s diary, written when the Jewish teenager was in hiding from the Nazis with her family, was made freely available online on Friday despite threats of legal action over copyright. A French MP and a university lecturer have published the original Dutch version of The Diary of a Young Girl on their websites 70 years after she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, aged 15. They argue that the work should now be free because under European law, copyright on written works expires 70 years after the author’s death. However, the Anne Frank Fund argues that it still owns the publication rights. The Swiss-based charity was founded by Frank’s father, Otto, and it claims that he made such significant changes to the manuscript that he “earned his own copyright”. Otto, who was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust, died in 1980. READ MORE