Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
Why is this about fair use? Random House contractually agreed to pay, then decided not to. This has nothing to do with fair use, and everything to do with breach of contract.
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According to the BBC and PBS (but not the longer newspaper reports), Random House first said they would pay the estate, but changed their mind. People can change their mind. Corporations can also reverse decisions. Googling, I can't find a claim that Random House entered into a contract with the Goebbels family anywhere, except in this thread.
If Random House Germany did reverse a bad decision, the likely impetus was author Phillip Longerich. Here's how he sees it:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...s-in-biography
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If you accept that a private person controls the rights to Goebbels’ diaries, then – theoretically – you give this person the right to control research.
Control of the rights could have included an inspection of the manuscript before publication, which did not happen in this case. But generally speaking we cannot allow such control from private persons, whatever their interests are.
In this case, we are dealing with the daughter of a cabinet colleague of Mr Goebbels. This is an absolutely unacceptable situation. It’s a question not only of morality, but of professionalism for a historian.
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As to whether it is about fair use, well, literally, I'm not sure, since fair use is an American legal phrase. But it is about that concept. If the subjects of biographies, or their heirs, get to shake down publishers (or, if self-published, authors) for cash, or force them to cut out quotations, that is a big freedom to read issue for readers of biographies.