Springer Nature pulls two Max Planck papers for 'copyright'—then sells the blank PDFs

Springer Nature has withdrawn two papers authored by Max Planck, the Nobel laureate who founded quantum theory, both originally published in the journal Naturwissenschaften in 1940 and 1942. The notices cite a ‘copyright violation,’ but the papers were not retracted for fraud or error. Instead, the removals appear to be a byproduct of modern, largely automated digitization and rights-management workflows being applied retroactively to historical scholarship. The 1942 piece was a lecture that circulated in several venues before and after its journal appearance—routine practice at the time, and something even Einstein did—which a present-day duplicate-content check would flag. The 1940 paper, by contrast, had never been published elsewhere, yet it was withdrawn under the same justification.