According to NBC News, the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is trying to take its fight over the copyright on the characters of Sherlock Holmes to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The issue is when the famous detective and his sidekick Dr. Watson enter the public domain. If the term of the copyright counts from the date of publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story, then Holmes and Watson are in the public domain, and others are free to write new Holmes stories without paying royalties to the estate of Conan Doyle, who died in 1930.
This is the position favored by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which decided on June 16 in a decision authored by Judge Posner that only the details in the final ten Holmes stories are still protected.
The petitioners argue that the term runs from the date of the last Holmes story published by Conan Doyle, and thus the copyright on the character is still in force.
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