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."

Comments

So much for public domain...

[Manip]

So you create copyright works in country A, and when that expires you then renew your copyright in country B? After that expires will they just transfer it yet again to another country and extend it yet again? Since all of these countries have [evil] trade treaties copyright in one is copyright in all....

Copyright is seriously out of control and I point the finger squarely at the US for creating this greedy flawed system...

where does the 2023 date come from?

[Trepidity]

The article doesn't explain precisely why it's still under copyright, except that it was renewed in 1981 after falling into the public domain, as permitted by the Copyright Act of 1976. But why hasn't it fallen back into the public domain again? Looking through this chart, I can't find any combination of circumstances that would allow an 1887 work, whose author died in 1930, to remain in copyright until 2023.