More Holmes lawsuits

It seems that the Conan Doyle Estate is back to suing people again. These extortionists regularly like to claim ownership of Sherlock Holmes in order to coerce TV, movie, and literary people to pay "license fees" for using the character. Back in 2013, Sherlockian Leslie Klinger learned that the Estate was trying to block one of his planned books, so he decided to sue the Estate to get Holmes declared a public domain character. The suit is chronicled on his Free Sherlock website, but basically Klinger won the case and the appeal, so Holmes and his related world are public domain.

Now in 2020, the Estate is trying to sue Netflix about a new Enola Holmes movie. This movie is based on a book series by Nancy Springer about Sherlock's younger sister Enola, but the Estate is only just now suing because it sees there's money in this. Also, they've changed tactics due to their previous defeat in court. The Estate used to argue that Sherlock evolved over time throughout all 60 stories, so because 10 of the original stories were still in copyright, the character as a whole should remain in copyright. This was rubbish because Conan Doyle was never that consistent in writing Sherlock. (The 10 cases are the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, published after 1923. That's the cutoff year for copyright in the United States.)

In Klinger's lawsuit the judge ruled that while Holmes is public domain, the Casebook stories are still in copyright.  So any characteristic of Holmes found exclusively in this Casebook is not in public domain yet. That's what the Conan Doyle Estate is arguing now, claiming that Netflix's movie and Springer's books feature traits of Sherlock that are only found in the Casebook stories. It's flimsy, but they hope this will work based on the prior precedent. They're so greedy, trying to get as much money as they can before all the stories fall out of copyright in 2023.

Meanwhile, movie releases are getting shifted again, with Mulan going to August now. It's so frustrating because it did have a movie premiere in March just before theatres shut down, but most of the country hasn't seen it yet. We'll have to wait some more I guess.