Protection of Classics

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (January 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Swedish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 300 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Klassikerskyddet]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|sv|Klassikerskyddet}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Protection of Classics is a provision of intellectual property law that is included in the Copyright Acts of the Nordic countries.^[1] According to this stipulation, it is forbidden to treat a work of art in a manner which violates cultural interests after the death of the author.^[2] This concerns also cases in which the copyright is no longer in force or has never existed, that is, material in the public domain.^[3]

The Copyright Acts of the Nordic countries resemble each other because important legislation used to be drafted jointly in these countries and that applied also to the copyright act preparation during the 1930s–1950s.^[4]

In most Nordic countries, there have been cases in which the prohibition has been imposed. Several cases exist in Norway, two in Denmark, and one in Finland. For instance in Denmark, it was ruled that also the Gospels are protected by this paragraph of the Copyright Act.^[1] In Finland, several translated children's books (including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) were banned in May 1962 because of the poor quality and clandestine abridgement of the translations. After appeals, the Supreme Court of Finland upheld the prohibition issued by the Finnish Ministry of Education.^[5]

See also

• Authors' rights
• Literary estate
• Legal issues with fan fiction

References