A US court has ruled that forty-six Sherlock Holmes stories and four novels are in the public domain and are no longer subject to the copyright of Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle.
The ruling comes as part of a lawsuit between Doyle’s estate and Leslie S. Klinger, the author of a new original work of fiction starring Holmes called A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon. In 2011, the estate demanded a licensing fee from his then publisher Pegasus Books who dropped the book over threats of a lawsuit and having the book blocked from major retailers. Random House later picked up the book and according to The Guardian, “paid the fees, even though Klinger thought that the Holmes stories were in the public domain.”
Klinger sued the estate and in December and the judge ruled in his favor. The estate appealed the decision, but the judge has upheld it. The Guardian has more: “‘Flat characters thus don’t evolve. Round characters do; Holmes and Watson, the estate argues, were not fully rounded off until the last story written by Doyle. What this has to do with copyright law eludes us,’ wrote Judge Richard A Posner in the court’s opinion.”