Itâs time to start the clock on Sherlock Holmes, folks.
First, a brief primer on copyright.
Contrary to what you may have heard, copyright doesnât directly cover characters, or ideas, or anything of the sort: it covers specific works, as well as any derivatives of those works.
âSpecific worksâ is the easy part: a book, a movie, a drawing, those are all specific works.
âDerivative worksâ is trickier. The basic idea is that you canât trace over a drawing or take a story and search-and-replace the names of all the characters and call it your own original work. In practice, most jurisdictions, including the United States, have tended to interpret the notion of derivative works much more broadly than that â and thatâs where the Doyle state comes in.
See, though most stories about Sherlock Holmes are old enough that they fall into the public domain, and can therefore be used by anyone, a tiny handful of them, published near the end of Arthur Conan Doyleâs life, are recent enough that they still have valid copyrights â which are now owned by Arthur Conan Doyleâs estate, which is to say, the people who inherited all his shit when he died, and their descendants, and so on.
Though the Doyle estate only owns a small number of stories, for many years theyâve been cheerfully exploiting the American legal systemâs extraordinarily broad notion of derivative work to stick their oar in every time somebody wants to publish Sherlock Holmes media without giving them a cut.
Basically, they go over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any microscopic piece of Sherlock Holmes lore that they can claim is present only in the few remaining stories that they own, and not in any of the stories that fall into the public domain.
This is what those articles you might have run into about Sherlock Holmes not being allowed to show emotions or respect women or whatnot come from: the Doyle estate pointing to some specific attitude or mannerism or turn of phrase which, they claim, is only present in the handful of stories they still own, and not in any of the others, and therefore you owe them all your money.
(Would those claims stand up in court? Almost certainly not, but the Doyle estate has a fuckoff huge legal budget and very few people have the time, inclination, or resources to fight them, so theyâve mostly been getting away with it.)
Thereâs an end in sight, though. In the United States, for all works published before 1978 â except audio recordings, for deeply stupid reasons â thereâs an easy-to-determine limit on the duration of copyright: the date of publication plus 95 years. The copyright on pre-1978 works can expire in less than 95 years in certain circumstances, but it canât be extended beyond that: publication plus 95 years is a hard cutoff.
Consequently, the number of remaining stories that the Doyle estate owns has been steadily shrinking.
First it was ten stories.
Then just two, which were both published in the same year: 1927.
In other words, this is the last year that the Doyle estate can claim to own any works at all in which Sherlock Holmes appears. After this, theyâll have nothing left to exploit.
364 days until the Doyle estate can get fucked.
