At home with Hitler...the end is nigh

3 OCT UPDATE It turns out Homes and Gardens don't have copyright over the photos.

The editor Homes and Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, asked me to take down the At Home with Hitler spread.

Dear Mr Waldman

Thank you for your email of 2nd September and for the link to your website. While I personally do appreciate the spirit in which you sent it to me, as a representative of IPC Media I am concerned to prevent the unauthorised reproduction of IPC's material, whenever it was originally published. This piece, text and photographs is still in copyright and any unauthorised reproduction is an infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must request you to remove this article from your website. Sorry that I had to take this stance, but am sure you will appreciate the legal situation.

Yours Sincerely

Isobel McKenzie-Price

Unfortunately, I am away at the moment, and can't get proper web access, I can't remove it from the site...it will be going down soon. I hope no-one mirrors it in the meantime.

Here is the e-mail I sent to her originally.

Isobel

Thought this might be of interest to you...a possibly lost bit from your archives.

A month or so ago, my father-in-law showed me a November 1938 edition of Homes and Gardens. He had kept it because it featured a four page photo story on a house that his father had designed.

He hadn't really looked at the rest of the magazine, but I took a flick through, and in the middle of it, I found this fantastic feature on 'Hitler's Mountain Home' - basically an 'At Home with Hitler' feature (with a guest appearance from Goering)

http://wow.blogs.com/photos/hitler/ahcover.html

I put it up on my personal website a month or so ago...and in the last few days, it's been linked from a few places and been looked at by tens of thousands of people from round the world.

I realise it's probably not going to go down as one of your magazines greatest moments...but hey, it's hardly your fault. Huge swathes of British society were pretty friendly towards Hitler at this time.

I wonder if you, or anyone there, knew this article had been published?

Do you have any copies yourself?

Anyway...just thought you'd be interested.

Regards

Simon Waldman

She didn't even answer any of my questions.

Comments

[Chris Dalrymple]

That's a real shame. I wonder if they would be prepared to publish it on their own website, and allow others to link to it.

Somehow I doubt it though, maybe leaves a bad taste in the mouth for the magazine?

Anyway, i'll read it while I can.

[eric]

it's quite the entertaining find. i hope it doesn't get mirrored either... by lots of people.

[dave .]

You should try contacting someone at Chilling Effects about this. I doubt you need to remove it. http://www.chillingeffects.org/

Dang Home & Gardens. I bet they wouldn't even appreciate the motorcycles in my living room.

[Bill Thompson]

It's not surprising - posting it was a clear breach of copyright, which you surely knew. Now if you'd written an essay around it and provided more commentary and criticism instead of just putting the pages up you might have had a case for it being fair dealing - though even then using the whole piece would be a problem.

But then, if someone took one of your articles and reproduced it in full on their site you might well want it taken down, too.

[Uwe]

Does a Copyright really last 65 years?

[Ignoramus]

The bad news:

In the UK, copyright protection extends to 70 years after the author's death.
In the case of a amagazine article, the copyright is usually transferred to the magazine publisher. The protection duration might extend to 95 years if the copyright holder is an entity -- e.g. a business -- and not a person.

The good news:

According to http://www.tasc.ac.uk/iss/copy/
quoting a single article from a journal, or up to 5% of a book, might still be considered as "fair dealing", and would thus be authorized.

[Chris Dalrymple]

Bill, I can understand your view. It's certainly true that it's a clear breech, but I think the intention behind it wasn't cynical, but more of historical observation. The source of the document still remains clear, and it's not being passed of as anyone elses.

I don't think anyone's saying it wasn't an infringement of copyright, just a shame such an interesting document had to be taken down.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Chris.

[simon]

I will be taking it down shortly...technically I'm assuming it is a breach.

But, as I'm making no money from it, and as I'm not depriving them from any revenue and as no-one else can really make any money from it, and as I'm not saying anything bad about H&G as a result of it, I sort of suspect that their motives for wanting it removed are not entirely to do with strict copyright reasons.

Actually, if someone did that with something I'd written..and the commercial conditions were as stated, I'd probably leave it. But then little that I've ever written has ever been worth very much to either myself or the publications who have printed it!

It is an interesting historical document. It says a lot more about British attitudes to Hitler than any of the text books I read at school. On a broader scale, it says a lot about our general approach to foreign leaders who might appear to be doing 'a good job' from the outside.

That said, the genie is now out of the bottle. I find it very difficult to believe that these documents will disappear. I know of at least one other site currently hosting it, and I've been contacted by a number of others who are interested.

If it was hosted outside the UK, it might not be so easy for them to ask for it to be removed. Anyway...will sort out in the morning.

[HÃ¥kon Styri]

»quoting a single article from a journal, or up to 5% of a book, might still be considered as "fair dealing", and would thus be authorized.«

Sorry, Ignoramus, the web site says copying, not quoting. It doesn't apply to fair use, but to the use of a copying machine. ;-)

[François Granger]

Simon,

Thanks for putting it online. Things like that must not disappear. The Internet is a big tool for keeping these things alive.

[James Wallis]

I note that your email to IPC did not ask permission to use their article. You presented it to them as a fait accompli -- which it was: 'Look, I've posted your copyrighted material on my website. Cope.' Great work on claiming the moral high ground there.

For IPC, I'm pretty sure they see it as a matter of precedent. They're going to instruct you to take it down, so that the next time someone scans and posts a Smash Hits spread on Recent Boyband 154 from two months ago and IPC tells them to take it down, they can't point at you and say, "Well, you didn't tell this guy to.'

Yes, it's an interesting article. No, you have no moral or legal right to do what you did.

[Simon Waldman]

James, you're right about the letter of the law. Although as a moral and legal infringements go, I'd suggest it's pretty low down in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, I'm not arguing over that: which is why I've taken the scans down.

All I've said in my latest correspondence is that it would be good for these documents to find an official home online (I'm sure there must be some webspace free in the IPC/AOL TimeWarner empire!), so that they can be both widely and legally available.

[Goaltender66]

Unless Mr. Waldman has a problem with it, I've taken the images and put them on my own blog. The actual page link is:

http://www.the-crease.org/archives/00000985.html

I'm based in the States, as is the server, so in the absence of an "official" home provided or approved by IPC I'm happy to keep these images up, in concert with the hundreds of other blogs that undoubtedly have them.

[Edgar Steele]

The copyright on this expired long ago...

Edgar Steele
Attorney at Law
Sandpoint, Idaho

[george]

sigh. there's a lot of 'putting it on the internet is good...for posterity...' going on here

say i want to, say, mirror, a (divX) copy of Triumph des Willens/ Triumph of the Way
It's banned in Germany, and might be banned/ lost in other countries. One might argue for free speech - and in doing so, like people that pirate copies of Windows OS, one would do a dis-service to people using/ releasing software/ magazines without (fair-use/ Perl artistic, Creative Commons, etc) copyright restrictions.

You ignore the fact that it's ILLEGAL(or breaches copright rules/ is not allowed under the civil rules that govern copyright) to redistribute that - for many, many complex reasons.

It's not *your* view, as a user, (whether or not it's "observation") to say what or what isn't "fair use" - it's the law's. No one forces GPL-style reuse on artists/ publishers. When they don't offer them, we have to respect their rights to not allow their works to be (re) distributed.

This mixes up IPC/ AOL/ whoever-owns-it's right on reuse with a (very) vague view of what's "important". What if I decided to mirror, say, guardian.co.uk, and scan in myself the bits that you don't put online (classified ads in the guide? job ads from 'jobs and money' ?) 'for posterity'

Would that be 'fair use'?

Do i want to read this: Yes, it's very interesting, thanks for blogging it.
Do i understand why the legal copyright owner wants it taken down? Yep.

Is that just 'cos it's about Adolf? Maybe

Is it anyway near as important, as, say, decss ? nope.
Is Hitler comparable to Castro, as one of your mirrors claims? ... er...no.

[Goaltender66]

It's cute when non-lawyers try to argue the law.

As for Castro vs. Hitler, I'd say the (insert name here) vs. Hitler has been overused and has thus lost its meaning. But I find it fascinating that a press that reviles Hitler and does their best to erase any positive mention of him generally fawns over Castro (who is such a failure as a dictator he can't even make those metaphorical trains run on time). However, I'm not the one to ask about Castro's "Hitlerness"...perhaps we could ask Oscar Espinosa Chepe, assuming he can still talk after his hours of torture and the regime's refusal to treat his cirrhosis.

Or perhaps we can ask Marta Beatriz Roque. But she's in solitary and can't receive mail, since she wrote a paper discussing Cuba's economic problems.

I'd suggest asking Oscar Elias Biscet, but he's not allowed any visitors because he was talking to other Cubans about the Universal Human Rights declaration.

Librado Linares had the audacity to organize a lunch program for the elderly...so he's jailed and we can't ask him.

There are more, conveniently ignored by the same philosophy that led to such a glowing review of Hitler's house by BH&G. But hey, as long as Europe is stable, what's the big deal, right? After all, they (like the Iraqis) are only brown people and apparently not worthy of the attention of the enlightened.

[Melma]

Stupid Copyright. Copyright is really slowing down education and historical understanding. When it is not used in order to help spreading knowledge, copyright should be illegal.

Law is man-made. Man can change it. So let's do just that.

[Bruce Schultz]

Here is something else that came from the eagles nest. Check out the url and take a look around. We still have this book in our posession. Also there is a charcoal drawing of you know who.

[alistair]

for the preservation of a vital piece of history in the most objective sense we can muster as thinking animals why not post the images on kazaa?then they will whizz digitally around the world,from hard drive to hard drive and be preserved for as long as we are all blinking.
p.s.kazaa is a peer to peer file sharing network.www.kazaa.com,sort of like a reverse pandoras box,if you will.

[alistair]

triumph of the will is also available on kazaa.

[Lynn S]

If everyone was forced to follow the letter of the law, the Internet as we know it could not exist. Copyright laws have been extended beyond all reason. They were never intended to last forever but that's what corporate entities are trying to acheive. It's time to fight back but that's almost impossible for individuals to do. We need a powerful organization of lawyers to fight for Internet rights.

[J. Dog]

I suspect that Homes & Garden wanted the Hitler piece taken down because an executive realised that there was money to be made re-issuing the piece.

Historic re-issues could make Homes & Gardens could do an entire re-issue of 1930's era celebs and place the Hilter piece in an historical context. Given its 1938 date, the piece would be pre-Holocaust and morally defensible.

I may be cynical, but I always see greed and hidden motives in corporate high-handedness. I think your discovery gave the magazine an idea on how to make a lot of money and they shut you down on that basis.

[E. J. Brock]

For the record, none of the photos in the "At Home With Hitler" article are original to the article. All were published previously in Germany and are in the public domain. IPC may own the copyright to the article itself, but not to the accompanying photographs.

[I. Smith]

It's interesting to see posts surrounding this issue. So many people defending copyright laws that they don't understand and that aren't confirmed, even. Of course, Homes and Gardens will say "pull it down, we own it". And 100% of the people arguing "it's interesting, but morally and legally you're wrong", would do just that, pull it down. The editor knows that most people will do as instructed, end of story.
I think the important question is do they even own the copyright? All the editorial about morality and legality, which are only knee jerk reactions by individuals programmed to follow instructions from anyone claiming to be an authority figure, is irrelevant. Maybe irrelevant altogether. And certainly not useful until the owner of the copyright has been confirmed.
I hope they don't own the copyrights and the pictures remain alive on the internet. People need to be reminded of the lessons of history. The people that are so often called "monsters" after the fact are often "friends" before it's politically harmful to say so. This happened with Hitler and it has happened more recently with Saddam Hussein and even more recently with the Taliban. We are told constantly told what is truth and what we should think, regardless of facts. Individuals are cast as "good" and "bad" regardless of the facts, the motivation being what the maker of truth stands to gain by what we think. Like the exposes of how our gov't gave the Taliban millions of dollars months before we began killing them, gives us not the cloudy illusions we are forever commanded to believe but the plain truth. That men seeking power, whatever their nationality, almost always perform cruel, ruthless acts in their quests for it is so often what the game of power commands.

I hope the pics stay alive.

[Rob Lunt]

i have just read the following, from The copyright website, which may be of some interest to Simon as i can see no copyright sign on the document assuming it is a full scan of the mag.
RobL

Lost Copyright
The public domain contains all works which previously had copyright protection, but which subsequently lost that protection due to pilot error. While it is all but impossible to lose copyright protection under today's laws, previous statutory schemes have not been so generous. For example, all works published before January 1, 1978 that did not contain a valid copyright notice may be considered to be in the public domain.

Owners of works published between 1978 and March 1, 1989 that did not contain a valid copyright notice were given a five year grace period in which to correct the problem of publication without notice before their work was unceremoniously tossed into the public domain.

Expired Copyright The public domain contains all works for which the statutory copyright period has expired.

Additionally, you are free to copy any work published before 1964 in which the copyright owner failed to renew his copyright. See the section on Duration of Copyrights for more detailed information on effective copyright periods.