No Fiction, not that Sherlock, calm down.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101298769
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101298769
A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works Arthur Conan Doyle published before January 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law, and can be freely used by new creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate.
The ruling came in response to a civil complaint filed in February by Leslie S. Klinger, the editor of the three-volume, nearly 3,000-page “Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes” and a number of other Holmes-related books. The complaint stemmed from “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,” a collection of new Holmes stories written by different authors and edited by Mr. Klinger and Laurie R. King, herself the author of a mystery series featuring Mary Russell, Holmes’s wife.
Mr. Klinger and Ms. King had paid a $5,000 licensing fee for a previous Holmes-inspired collection. But in the complaint, Mr. Klinger said that the publisher of "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," Pegasus Books, had declined to go forward after receiving a letter from the Conan Doyle Estate, a business entity organized in Britain, suggesting the estate would prevent the new book from being sold by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and "similar retailers" unless it received another fee.
Chief Judge Rubén Castillo of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, rejected the estate's claim that the characters and the basic Holmes storyline themselves remain under copyright, since they were not truly completed until Conan Doyle stopped writing. The judge did caution, however, that elements introduced in the 10 stories published after 1923—such as the fact that Watson played rugby for Blackheath—remain protected.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Klinger said he planned to go forward with "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," which he said carefully avoided any post-1923 elements. He also praised the ruling for opened the way to other creators, many of whom had previously paid licensing fees to the estate but rallied to Mr. Klinger's cause under the Twitter hashtag #FreeSherlock.
"Sherlock Holmes belongs to the world, and this ruling clearly establishes that," he said. "People want to celebrate Holmes and Watson, and now they can do that without fear."