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Sherlock Holmes and the Copyright Tangle
spagiola passes along a New York Times piece on the copyright travails of Sherlock Holmes. "At his age [123 years], Holmes would logically seem to have entered the public domain. But not only is the character still under copyright in the United States, for nearly 80 years he has also been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn't have wished them upon him."
Sherlock Holmes on Project Gutenberg
The last sherlock holmes story was published in 1927 which would theoretically last under copyright until 2023. But the majority of the stories are pre-1920 and presumably public domain. The post-1923 are also considered the worst according to wikipedia. But mostly in the bookstore you see a large compilation of Sherlock Holmes with every story. To publish every story you'd need to pay a royalty for the 5% still under copyright. The estate charges an inflated amount for this 5% and the publisher pays it since he is spreading the cost over the stories that he doesn't have to strictly pay for.
This reminds me of the Smiley Face trademark escapades. The posters for the Watchmen movie were different depending on the country. There was also an issue with Wal-Mart using it, apparently.
Copyright lawyers have to earn their salaries somehow, I suppose.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
In America the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 gave an author or his heirs a chance to recapture lost rights; Conan Doyle's daughter, Jean, did so in 1981.
Yes, and it's a travesty. The heirs of Jack Kirby are using it in an attempt to steal dozens of characters that Kirby helped create while at Marvel back in the 60's, and the heirs of Siegal used it to reclaim the character of Superboy from DC. It is going to happen a LOT in the upcoming decade.
Because this is a typical kdawson article, that in this case picked a New York Times article that was itself also clueless.
Most Holmes stories were published prior to 1923 and are in public domain in the US. The remaining stories are copyrighted, but if you don't use any elements from those copyrighted stories you should be fine, and since they are only a few at the end, it really isn't all that hard not to use anything from those stories. To say that Sherlock Holmes is copyrighted until 2023 is a little misleading--if you want to use material covering his entire Doyle career (his last Doyle story was 1927), then you have to wait until 2023, but you generally won't need to.
Copyright laws were made at first because publishers made copies of authors' works without their consent or giving them compensation. The idea was to give authors control for a time to allow them to profit from it and thereby encourage more creative works. That's been twisted now of course but that was the idea at the time.
For me that page says - Print List Price: $3.99, Kindle Price: $2.35 includes VAT & international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet, You Save: $1.64 (41%). So maybe it's free to US Kindle owners, but not international ones. Poor dumb saps.
Funny, cause the Berne Convention came first (in the sense of copyrights lasting longer than the author).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works
Huh? Incentive for creative work was an argument for copyright?
No. It wasn’t.
Yes it was.
The English Statute of Anne (1710) which predated the German grant of rights by nearly 85 years was in its own words enacted "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books".
You can Trademark a character, but you can't Copyright him.
You can Copyright "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (which is in the Public Domain), but "Sherlock Holmes" isn't Copyrightable.
Note that much of the Holmes canon is in the Public Domain, since it was originally published in the 19th century. There are only a few Conan Doyle stories (and a great many movies and Holmes stories by other authors) that were Copyrighted late enough to still be under Copyright.
Note also that owning the Trademark for Holmes allows one to play goalkeeper for anyone who wants to do an original Holmes work (and extract money in the process), but it doesn't actually allow one to control the republishing of the original Holmes stories from the 19th Century.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You do understand that Creative Commons licenses are legally based on the very same copyright you want to get rid of, right?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Because the law doesn't say copyrights are eternal. Therefore you cannot milk something indefinitely.
If I passed a law that said copyrights now last 10^100 years our cowards on the Supreme Court would still say it was constitutional because it fit the definition of 'limited time'. even if that time would be some time after the heat death of the freaking universe.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I got them all from Project Gutenberg. And kudos for getting the word "upon" into the summary.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Well, except for the fact the article is wrong on several accounts and so are the heirs, interesting article.
First, it was the 1997 Sono Bono copyright act that extended the copyright for the single Sherlock Holmes book published after 1922, but the rmaining Sherlock Holmes books have long ago entered the public domain. Therefore the character is public domain, but no derivative work based on the 1927 Sherlock Holmes book can be made until 2017.
But don't take my word for it, see for yourself at gutenberg.org.
I don't remember Holmes ever saying "Elementary" in the stories. Wikipedia confirms this:
A third major reference is the oft-quoted but non-canonical phrase: "Elementary, my dear Watson." This phrase was never actually said by Holmes, since it does not appear in any of the sixty Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.
Now, do we trust wikipedia? Discuss.