From the beginning, in 1937 and 1938 Baroness Ehrenfels held the legal copyright to the works of Kurban Said, a copyright that has now passed by inheritance to her niece Leela Ehrenfels. Leela Ehrenfels's lawyer, Heinz Barazon, has successfully defended the Ehrenfels family's ownership of the copyright to "Ali and Nino". Reiss argues, however, that rather than being the actual author behind the name Kurban Said, Baroness Ehrenfels instead acted as an "Aryanizer" for Nussimbaum, meaning she took legal ownership of the pseudonym Kurban Said while passing income to him generated from books published under that name. Heinz Barazon, Reiss reports, pointed out that a publishing contract for "Ali and Nino" was signed in Vienna on April 20, 1937, well before Nussimbaum, as a Jew, would have lost the right to publish in the wake of the "Anschluss", or Nazi German annexation of Austria, which took place in March 1938.