Kate. 32. Bi. Used to be benaddicted4life. Welcome! Obsessive tagger and very multifandom; lots of Tolkien, WOT, Johnlock, Leverage, Sense8, RPDR, Black Sails, B99, America’s ass, music, pictures, politics, etc (check out my tags page for more). Current love is Heartstopper : D I will publish my own photos and fanfic on occasion. This is a hate free blog; please stop by and say hello! xx
Been going through my A03 bookmarks [some from A DECADE AGO!!!] and daaammnnnn were there some amazing Sherlock writers. Legitimately the best fandom as far as size and scope of fanworks that I’ve ever experienced. Makes what Mofftiss did even worse in a way. They had an enthusiastic and talented and dedicated fanbase right there!!! and squandered it anyway.
It’s time to start the clock on Sherlock Holmes, folks.
First, a brief primer on copyright.
Contrary to what you may have heard, copyright doesn’t directly cover characters, or ideas, or anything of the sort: it covers specific works, as well as any derivatives of those works.
“Specific works” is the easy part: a book, a movie, a drawing, those are all specific works.
“Derivative works” is trickier. The basic idea is that you can’t trace over a drawing or take a story and search-and-replace the names of all the characters and call it your own original work. In practice, most jurisdictions, including the United States, have tended to interpret the notion of derivative works much more broadly than that – and that’s where the Doyle estate comes in.
See, though most stories about Sherlock Holmes are old enough that they fall into the public domain, and can therefore be used by anyone, a tiny handful of them, published near the end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, are recent enough that they still have valid copyrights – which are now owned by Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, which is to say, the people who inherited all his shit when he died, and their descendants, and so on.
Though the Doyle estate only owns a small number of stories, for many years they’ve been cheerfully exploiting the American legal system’s extraordinarily broad notion of derivative work to stick their oar in every time somebody wants to publish Sherlock Holmes media without giving them a cut.
Basically, they go over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any microscopic piece of Sherlock Holmes lore that they can claim is present only in the few remaining stories that they own, and not in any of the stories that fall into the public domain.
This is where those articles you might have run into about Sherlock Holmes not being allowed to show emotions or respect women or whatnot come from: the Doyle estate pointing to some specific attitude or mannerism or turn of phrase which, they claim, is only present in the handful of stories they still own, and not in any of the others, and therefore you owe them all your money.
(Would those claims stand up in court? Almost certainly not, but the Doyle estate has a fuckoff huge legal budget and very few people have the time, inclination, or resources to fight them, so they’ve mostly been getting away with it.)
There’s an end in sight, though. In the United States, for all works published before 1978 – except audio recordings, for deeply stupid reasons – there’s an easy-to-determine limit on the duration of copyright: the date of publication plus 95 years. The copyright on pre-1978 works can expire in less than 95 years in certain circumstances, but it can’t be extended beyond that: publication plus 95 years is a hard cutoff.
Consequently, the number of remaining stories that the Doyle estate owns has been steadily shrinking.
First it was ten stories.
Then six.
Then just two, which were both published in the same year: 1927.
1927 + 95 = 2022.
In other words, this is the last year that the Doyle estate can claim to own any works at all in which Sherlock Holmes appears. After this, they’ll have nothing left to exploit.
country boys wear the tightest pair of blue jeans you’ve ever seen and unbutton their flannel to the nipple like.. who at this rodeo needs to know you’re a slut. the clown?
Every time this post crosses my dash it’s tagged with a different Timothy olyphant character and you’re all correct
“I’ve seen fake gods and bad gods and demigods and would-be gods, and out of all that, out of that whole pantheon, if I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in her.”
extremely fucking weird to have to convince leftists that fighting for a better public education system & better wages for teachers is not, like, the Lame Establishment Dem take or whatever.
It is not Cool and Radical to advocate for the dissolution of the entire public education system in favor of Everyone Doing Their Own Thing. what you’re describing is libertarianism, and a system that directly and dramatically benefits fascist right-wingers and child abusers.
the community-centered child rearing yall love to talk about exists. it desperately needs to be improved, but the bones are here, and they’re already doing a lot of legwork in the fight against aggressive nuclear family isolation.
ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD at Paris Fashion Week Fall 2022
if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways
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