18 July 2014Copyright

Supreme Court denies requests to stay Sherlock Holmes judgment

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal against a decision that brings the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes out of copyright protection.

The Conan Doyle Estate, which manages the copyright belonging to Sherlock Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had asked the court to stay a lower court decision which ruled that the character was in the public domain.

The Doyle Estate said it was planning a full appeal but wanted the judgment to be suspended in the meantime.

But the plea was dismissed by Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday, July 17.

The initial case began last year after author Leslie Klinger attempted to publish an anthology called In the Company of Sherlock Holmes.

After the Doyle Estate contacted the book’s publisher Pegasus to ask for a licensing agreement, the publishing house refused and said it wanted a court to use US copyright law to determine whether it could portray the character freely.

US law states that works published prior to 1923 are in the public domain, meaning characters included in them could theoretically be represented in later works by different authors.

The majority of Doyle’s work is already in the public domain but ten of his short stories, published after 1923, continue to have copyright protection until 2022.

The estate said those stories contained significant character developments from the earlier works and that any representation of Holmes would constitute infringement of the entire collection.

Both the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the claims.

The Doyle Estate told the Agence France-Presse news agency it would follow up the decision "in the coming months" and looked forward to presenting its arguments.

In the UK, where there has been a modernised television series based on the detective and his sidekick Dr Watson, copyright expired in 1980.

The Doyle Estate did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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