Happy Sherlock Holmes Public Domain Day

[Apache]

Old joke in my business. You never lend money to anyone who's profession starts with a P.
Politicians, Prostitutes (actually the same profession) Preachers etcetera.
Apache

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Bring back Life +50. The extensions do nothing for creators and are just corporate greed.

There's a joke somewhere about copyright term in the U.S. being life + n years, where n is defined as "number of years since Walt Disney died."

[kyôdai]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

This means that the Conan Doyle Estate can no longer sue somebody who writes an adaptation where Sherlock Holmes is "too friendly."

I think, the main purpose of these lawsuits might have been to establish the Conan Doyle Estate as the (sole) rights holder of "Sherlock Holmes".

Because as it turns out, it is not quite clear who actually owned the rights to the books or the characters at that point.

You can read about it on the wikipedia page of Jean Conan Doyle, the daughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Conan_Doyle

"She and the widows of her brothers initially shared control of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's literary trust; however, the women did not get along."

"Using a loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), in 1970 Princess Nina [*one of her brothers widows] bought the estate and established Baskervilles Investments Ltd. [...] Eventually, the princess fell dramatically behind on the loan, and the RBS ended up with the rights to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works."

"The bank then sold the rights to Lady Etelka Duncan [...]"

"Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., a privately owned UK company formed in 2005, claims that Dame Jean regained some of the US rights following the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, [...]"

"At her death at age 84, Dame Jean's will stipulated that any remaining copyrights she owned were to be transferred to the Royal National Institute for the Blind."

"The National Institute for the Blind sold the rights back to the Conan Doyle heirs."

"(As of 2015 there were eight surviving Conan Doyle heirs. None is a direct descendant, as neither Jean nor her brothers had any children.)"

[Critteranne]

Originally Posted by kyôdai

I think, the main purpose of these lawsuits might have been to establish the Conan Doyle Estate as the (sole) rights holder of "Sherlock Holmes".

Because as it turns out, it is not quite clear who actually owned the rights to the books or the characters at that point.

It's such a mess.

The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate has its own website, completely separate from Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

And unlike the other site, they don't sell official Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Mountblanc pens from their website -- ranging from £ 770.00 to £ 32,000.00. Instead, they have information about ... Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! (But they did license a Sherlock Holmes pen...)

It reminds me of the way Middle-earth Enterprises (once known as Tolkien Enterprises) was actually created by a film producer and yet owns some worldwide exclusive rights to some of Tolkien's works. (It's now owned by Embracer Group.) You can go to the licensing portion of their website and buy licensed products like Tolkien games, Rivendell bicycles, Middle Earth Honey, and even mats from Middle Earth Yoga.

[astrangerhere]

I'm reminded of the quote from the beginning of Bleak House about Jarndyce and Jarndyce in the court of Chancery:

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good.

[Quoth]

And US Copyright expired on Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/aut...r=release_date
Casebook https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69700
Adventures https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48320
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1892–1893 in The Strand)
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (stories published 1903–1904 in The Strand)
His Last Bow

Other Holmes on Gutenberg:

Study in Scarlet
Valley of fear
Hound of the Baskerviles
The Sign of the Four

I recommend "Older Kindles" and use Calibre to convert to epub2 (then the epub2 to azw3, epub3 etc as desired) with:
Tablet images
Smarten punctuation
Justify (only affects body CSS rules)
remove spaces between paragraphs
remove styles: line-height, white-space

You may also need to remove nested blockquotes to leave just one.
In last year Gutenberg seems to have gone a bit mad on formatting.


In reality people have been doing versions and pastiches since the lifetime of Conan Doyle. The excellent Maurice Leblanc had to change the name of Sherlock Holmes after Conan Doyle complained, hence Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_pastiches

In 1942, a short story entitled "The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted" was discovered by a Conan Doyle biographer, Hesketh Pearson, while searching through a trunk full of Doyle family papers. It was published in 1947 as a "lost" story written by Conan Doyle, but it was eventually discovered by Pearson that the story was originally written in 1914 by Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Doyle in hope of a collaboration. Doyle had bought the story from the author, in case he might use the ingenious plot at a later date, but never did.

I quite like Anthony Horowitz but didn't like his two approved Holmes books.
I did enjoy Laurie R. King's "The Beekeeper's Apprentice", the start of her Mary Russell series set during World War I and the 1920s. Retired Holmes is a beekeeper.

Copyright expired in 1980 in the UK, though the UK claimed many copyrights renewed when they badly implemented EU law in 1996, but the Conan Doyle copyrights expired again in 2000.

Anyone that wanted Holmes has bought cheap copies decades ago, or got them free.
The various people claiming to own copyrights have sponsored some approved 3rd party written texts. But there is plenty they didn't control and they have lost cases.

The USA expiry maybe only affects a couple of Conan Doyle titles on Gutenberg USA.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

Some people are already worried that this means people will rush off to create Sherlock Holmes horror movies

Isn't the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles already a Holmes horror movie?

[Quoth]

Pretty much.