In a previous blawg post, I discussed a case that had just been filed in the Federal District Court for the North District of Illinois, in which a noted Sherlock Holmes scholar filed a lawsuit against the estate of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the original author of the Sherlock Holmes books), in which he asked the court to acknowledge that the characters of Holmes and Watson are in the public domain and, as such, are no longer protected by copyright in the U.S. In the case, the estate argued that because Conan Doyle gradually fleshed out the Holmes and Watson characters over the course of all the Holmes stories, copyright protection on the character extended until the last story entered the public domain. They explained that Holmes was a “round” character who was not fleshed out until the very last story.
As I predicted in that previous post, the District court was not persuaded by the Estate’s argument and granted the declaratory judgment that the characters are now in the public domain. The United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision announced this week, upheld the lower court’s ruling that the characters now are in the public domain. Writing for the Court of Appeals, Judge Richard Posner rejected the Estate’s creative “ever evolving character” theory of copyright protection, which he noted was basically just a veil for the Conan Doyle estate’s hope of achieving almost 135 years of full copyright protection, far beyond the term protected in the Copyright Act.
