Sherlock Holmes is in the Public Domain
September 10, 2014
A recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the characters and elements of the Sherlock Holmes stories are available in the public domain. The dispute stems from Leslie Klinger’s development of an anthology of stories, inspired by the Holmes canon and written by well-known contemporary authors. There is no dispute that of the 56 short stories and 4 novels featuring Holmes, only 10 stories remain under copyright in the United States.
Despite having only 10 stories under copyright, the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, argued that the Holmes and Watson characters are not “complete” without elements from the 10 copyrighted stories. As a result, the estate argued any authors wanting to use those characters still had to pay to license the characters. Klinger sued for, and won a declaratory judgment and the estate took its appeal to the 7th Circuit, which upheld the decision.
The Court rejected the estate’s contention that Holmes and Watson were not complete without the 10 copyrighted stories. The court cited Silverman v. CBS Inc., which found that character copyrights were not extended in a situation much like this one. The court did not specifically rule on whether the anthology infringes on the actual 10 copyrighted stories, even if the characters can be complete without them.