Tag Archives: Copyright law

Sherlock Holmes goes public in 2023

Big news in the literary world today – as this article from the Chicago Sun Times reports, Sherlock Holmes will finally be wholly in the public domain as of tomorrow, the last copyrights for his stories having run out. (If I understand correctly, most of the stories are already out of copyright, but Doyle was still cranking the things out – reluctantly – in 1927).

That was two years before he was filmed doing the interview above. It’s ten minutes divided into two halves. The first half – the interesting part – tells how he came to write Holmes, and discusses the character’s fame. In the second half, Doyle climbs up on his perpetual hobbyhorse, Spiritualism. You, like me, might want to give that part a miss.

I think Doyle underrates himself as a writer in this monologue. He suggests that the great appeal of Sherlock Holmes was the logical, “scientific” approach to problem solving. I think the great draw was always the inherent interest of the characters, especially the friendship between Holmes and Watson.

One of the little stock speeches I often employ to repel prospective acquaintances involves a comparison between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. If you watch very old Holmes movies (and I’ve viewed a few lately), you might be surprised to see that they’re always set in the years when the film is made. Thus we see him and Watson tootling around in automobiles and talking over phones. (In one strange film, The Speckled Band [1931], Raymond Massey plays a youngish Holmes employing a stable of secretaries to continually collate information for him, like a primitive database.)

I like to point out that people in the early 20th Century saw Holmes just the way we see James Bond today. The Bond stories were originally written in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the movies began in the ‘60s and have gone on from there. Thus we think of Bond as a contemporary. We assume he’s operating in 2022 (soon 2023), and that he carries a cell phone and uses a PC, among other things. The fact that this is a very different level of technology from what’s found in Ian Fleming’s original stories doesn’t bother us at all.

In exactly the same way, people in the 1920s thought of Holmes as a man of their time. They expected him to drive a car and use a phone (and in fact, in the later Doyle stories he actually does those things). The idea that Holmes should be stuck in the late 19th Century only came later. The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone (1939) was the first movie to put him back in period, and that was an innovation.

A blessed New Year to you.

Free book news!

One of the most complex matters they made us study in library school was copyright. Like so many matters of law in the US, it has grown and metastasized to the point where I (personally) doubt that anyone really understands it.

One of the problems in copyright law has been that US statute has extended copyright protection far beyond the original term (it was 14 years at first, as I recall). Now copyright lasts long beyond the author’s lifetime. This may be a boon to the heirs and agents of authors of enduring bestsellers, but in fact most of the books published from the 1920s to the 1940s are now out of print, but still protected. Now the Internet Archive is making a collection of these books (ironically named after Sonny Bono) available, through a loophole in the law. And more are to come.

The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane University calls this “Library Public Domain.” She and her students helped bring the first scanned books of this era available online in a collection named for the author of the bill making this necessary: The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. Thousands more books will be added in the near future as we automate. We hope this will encourage libraries that have been reticent to scan beyond 1923 to start mass scanning their books and other works, at least up to 1942.

I expect that this might make a lot of hard-boiled mysteries available again, for free. Good news for me.

Read it all here. Hat tip: Books, Inq., thanks to Dave Lull.