Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules in case of the heckled brand; Guardian, 6/16/14

Jessica Glenza, Guardian; Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules in case of the heckled brand:

"A US court has ruled that Sherlock Holmes – along with 46 stories and four novels he’s appeared in – is in the public domain, reaffirming the expiration of the copyright once owned by the estate of Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle.

The ruling by the seventh US circuit court of appeals in Chicago comes after the Doyle estate threatened to sue the editor of a book of original Holmes fiction if the author didn’t pay licensing fees.

Doyle’s estate contacted Leslie Klinger in 2011, when he was about to publish an anthology of original fiction starring Holmes, A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon. The estate demanded publisher Random House pay $5,000 in licensing fees for the use of the Holmes character.

Random House paid the fees, even though Klinger thought that the Holmes stories were in the public domain."

Conan Doyle estate seeks to preserve US copyright of Sherlock Holmes's 'complex personality'; Guardian, 9/19/13

Liz Bury, Guardian; Conan Doyle estate seeks to preserve US copyright of Sherlock Holmes's 'complex personality' : "...whether use of the characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson is covered by copright law until the entire Holmes canon is out of copyright in the United States. At present, 10 stories from the final collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, remain in copyright, with the stories due to enter the public domain in different years up to 2022. Sherlockian editor and Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Leslie Klinger filed a suit in February with the aim of establishing that the characters of Holmes and Watson are already in the public domain in the US, after he was asked to pay for a licence to use them in his planned book In The Company of Sherlock Holmes... In its defence, filed this week in Illinois district court, the Doyle estate argues that the characters remain protected until the copyrights in the final stories expire, because the subtleties and quirks of character that define the super-intelligent detective, his trusty right-hand man, and the duo's relationship, were developed throughout the entire body of works."