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Pirating Pippi

Lindgren's Heirs Crack Down on Rip-Offs

By Nils Klawitter

Swedish children's book author Astrid Lindgren, who would have been 100 on Nov. 14, is known to young readers the world over as the creator Pippi Longstocking. These days, though, Lindgren's heirs are struggling to put an end to the production of an endless series of Pippi Longstocking-related pirate products.

She lost her mother at an early age and her father was swept overboard on the high seas. Things couldn't get much worse for a 9-year-old girl. But Pippi Longstocking's travails didn't end there. Some time ago, she fell into the hands of an Italian toy producer who transformed her into a kind of Barbie doll, complete with breasts and see-through lace panties.

Swedish children book author Astrid Lindgren's heroine has fascinated millions of young readers with her irrepressible cheekiness and her refusal to succumb to kitsch, etiquette and other grown-up neuroses. Is she now doomed to end up a cheap Lolita to be pawed at by Christmas shoppers?

Lindgren wanted Pippi to remain a child forever. "Astrid would never have allowed that," says Nils Nyman, Lindgren's grandson and the spokesman for her heirs. Nyman directs Saltkrakan AB, the company that owns the associated brands and copyright on the work of Lindgren, who died in 2002.

Anyone wanting to sell a "Pippi" T-shirt or print a new edition of "Michel" has to ask Saltkrakan for permission.

But unlike J. K. Rowling, the author of "Harry Potter," who sold her merchandising rights to Warner Bros. for a large sum, Saltkrakan is no multimillion-dollar, perfectly organized media corporation. True, Lindgren's books, which have sold more than 145 million copies the world over, remain bestsellers to this day and the films based on her scripts continue to be immensely popular. But Saltkrakan makes only about €2 million ($2.9 million) a year.

For one thing, Nyman blames the vast number of pirate merchandise products that are now showing up left and right, just in time for his grandmother's 100th birthday on Nov. 14. But he also atrributes his company's revenue slump to outright fraud -- as in the case of a Russian publisher who, having acquired the rights to print Lindgren's books, consistently declared sales figures that were only one-tenth of the actual number of copies sold.

To make things worse, the author herself was not known for devoting much attention to the details of her contracts. Lindgren once wrote that large sums of money scared her. Many of her contractual partners promptly set about arranging things to suit them best.

Years went by before the family succeeded in getting an overview of the contracts signed. "There were even contracts without written documents," says Nyman. Nor was Lindgren particularly interested in fixing terms of validity for her contracts.

In her "worse moments," she sold far-reaching commercial rights -- for cartoon adaptations, for instance, says Nyman. He is taking more and more of these cases to court, driven by a sense of responsibility for his grandmother's work.

Pippi Costumes and Skin Creams

In Sweden, Lindgren's heirs are involved in a suit against film producer Svensk Filmindustri over a Christmas CD featuring a new compilation of songs from films based on the author's books. Waldemar Bergendahl -- a producer who had been involved in the making of the early Lindgren films and is now over 70 -- was recruited for the production of the CD.

Bergendahl represents a kind of life insurance for the company. Svensk Filmindustri's director Rasmus Ramstad explains that, in accordance with Lindgren's wishes, the contracts stipulate that Bergendahl be involved in the Lindgren projects. Ramstad was therefore surprised by the recent lawsuit. He maintains that Svensk Industri has done exactly the same for the CD as for previous Lindgren projects. Besides, he adds, his company would never do anything "against the wishes of the family."

The terms of the contracts are "open to interpretation and urgently in need of revision," says Ralph Oliver Graef. The Hamburg lawyer, who specializes in media issues, represents the Swedish heirs and has a growing mountain of plagiarized products piling up in his filing cabinet: "Pippi" costumes from China and even "Pippi" skin creams whose production and sales were never authorized by the family.

Graef just recently issued a legal warning to a T-shirt mail-order company in Duisburg, Germany for infringement of trademark. Previously, he took action against major companies like Ikea and the Weltbild publishing house.

Hamburg-based publishing house Oetinger recently discovered just how labyrinthine the path through Lindgren licensing rights can be. Oetinger is the Swedish author's publisher of choice in Germany and has released a CD and a songbook in time for her anniversary. Acquiring the rights took more than a year, says publishing house director Silke Weitendorf. Some of the composers had died and their heirs were sometimes impossible to track down. "It was endless work," she says.

Weitendorf's step-father, publishing house founder Friedrich Oetinger, had things a lot easier when he traveled to Sweden in 1949 in search of new inspiration and met Astrid Lindgren. Five German publishing houses had previously rejected her book "Pippi Longstocking," which they considered to be too modern and anarchist.

At the time, Oetinger and Lindgren reached an agreement in the form of a one-page contract. The Hamburg-based publishing house has sold more than 7 million German language translations of "Pippi Longstocking" since -- and it remains the Swedish heirs' most important partner.

The same can hardly be said about Munich-based media company EM.TV, now called EM.Sport Media. The company has sold all the licensing rights it acquired for its Pippi cartoon to the Italian company that went on to use them to create the Lolita-like "Pippi" doll.