Monday, December 30, 2013

Sherlock Holmes in Public Domain

It's Elementary, My Dear! Sherlock Holmes in public domain, reported by Leslie S. Klinger.

From Leslie S. Klinger's post:
On Monday, December 23, 2013, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled on our motion for summary judgment against the Conan Doyle Estate in the case brought in my name last February. The case challenged the Estate’s contention that Laurie R. King and I needed to license the right for creators to pen new stories about the literary figures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. The Court’s ruling states, in brief, that creators are free to use the characters of Holmes and Watson without licensing them from the Conan Doyle Estate. The Court cautioned that new stories about the pair can’t use elements that appear exclusively in the ten post-1922 stories by Conan Doyle (those that remain in copyright). However, elements from the fifty pre-1923 stories are in the public domain.

Read Leslie S. Klinger's post HERE.

Also reported in Publishers Weekly HERE.

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