Late last month, a federal judge ruled (pdf) that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are now public domain characters. The plaintiff, publisher Leslie S. Klinger, celebrated the ruling:
Sherlock Holmes belongs to the world. This ruling clearly establishes that. Whether it’s a reimagining in modern dress (like the BBC’s Sherlock or CBS-TV’s Elementary), vigorous interpretations like the Warner Bros. fine Sherlock Holmes films, or new stories by countless authors inspired by the characters, people want to celebrate Holmes and Watson. Now they can do so without fear of suppression by [Arthur] Conan Doyle’s heirs.
Jesse Walker calls the decision “mostly good news”:
I call this mostly good news because the judge sided with the Doyle estate when it came to elements of the Holmes mythos introduced after 1923. Those are still under copyright protection in the U.S., so if you want to publish a story that mentions, say, Dr. Watson’s career as a rugby player, you still need to pay a fee to Doyle’s heirs.
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw considers the implications for “countless fan writers” over the last 125 years:
In the world of fanfic, Sherlock Holmes is the oldest and greatest source of what we think of as modern fandom, a culture that primarily subsists on the discussion and exchange of fanfiction and other transformative works. When Conan Doyle was still alive, readers often sent him samples of their own Holmes fanfiction, many of which he personally acknowledged. This even includes a Holmes parody by Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, The Adventure of the Two Collaborators, which was originally thought by many readers to be the work of Doyle himself.
Zooming out, Michelle Dean takes a moderate view on the ruling:
I certainly agree that people’s great-grandchildren, and frankly corporations, are not entitled to unending streams of license revenue. But there is a significant constituency of people in between, say the recently widowed partners of artists, who I think have a case that they deserve some money. And the easiest way to achieve that is to extend a finite amount of protection after someone’s death. If that puts people, like the complainants in this case, at a disadvantage when they put together anthologies of Sherlock Homes stories knowing full well that such stories wouldn’t sell if they were called Herlock Sholmes stories, so be it. At least, for a while.
Meanwhile, M.H. Forsyth assesses the Victorian sleuth as “the Messiah who can save us all from Modernism”:
To Sherlock Holmes, there are no fragments. To Sherlock Holmes, there are no strangers. The signature action of Sherlock Holmes is his ability to tell a visitor his whole biography after mere glance, as he does at the opening of almost every tale. All stories are completed for him. There are no more fragments. This is why we remember Sherlock Holmes much more than we remember any particular crime that he solves. Sherlock Holmes is a vision of how modern man can cope with the modern city. He is an idea and an ideal. Through Sherlock Holmes, the Modern Condition of fragments and incomplete stories is vanquished. He is another way of looking at the city.
(Video: The BBC’s newest “mini-episode” of Sherlock, “Many Happy Returns”)
The Dish 