“Why celebrate the public domain?” Jenkins writes on the center’s website. are dictated by Congress Duke provides a helpful guide to the intricacies of copyright law here.) copyrights, many of which have a life span of 95 years. On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927, which include Doyle’s final Holmes stories, will enter the public domain in the United States.Įvery year, Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, puts together an extensive list of expiring U.S. The estate eventually settled the lawsuit with the defendants, which included Netflix, Penguin Random House and others, but soon the questions it raises will be irrelevant. And in Enola Holmes, the character has too much heart.

The legal argument, in a nutshell: Sensitive Sherlock is protected by copyright. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy.” When Doyle wrote his final Sherlock stories in the wake of World War I, “it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind,” reads the lawsuit. The estate argued that early Sherlock Holmes is cold and rational, while the later versions of the character-the versions still protected-have a heart. Copyrights for his last few stories, however, have not yet expired, which complicates matters: Details from early stories are fair game, while elements exclusive to later stories aren’t. Even if he had, most of his Holmes stories have been in the public domain for quite some time, which means that they are free for anyone to adapt or use as they please. In a 2020 lawsuit, Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate argued that Enola Holmes, a book series and Netflix adaptation that follows Sherlock Holmes’ brilliant teenage sister, violated copyright laws.ĭoyle, of course, never wrote a sister for Sherlock.

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