At the time of this posting, it is now 37 days until the final two original Sherlock Holmes casefiles written by Arthur Conan Doyle enter the public domain.
First, for works created by non-corporate authors and first published prior to 1978, the duration of copyright is determined based on the date of first publication, rather than the lifetime of the artist. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were published serially over a forty-year period spanning 1887 through 1927 (inclusive), so there’s been a long stretch where some but not all of them have resided in the public domain. Works first published in 1927 will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2023.
Second, back in the 1990s, Disney engaged in a major lobbying push to prevent cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. The result of this lobbying was the Copyright Term Extension Act
of 1998, often informally known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Because obtaining an exemption for Mickey Mouse in particular wasn’t politically tenable, the effect of this act was to institute a twenty-year extension of all extant copyrights at the time that the act went into effect. The public domain in the United States was thus “frozen” for twenty years, with no new works whatsoever entering the public domain between January 1st, 1998 and January 1st, 2019.
In the absence of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, the final Sherlock Holmes stories would have entered the public domain in 2003.
At the time of this posting, it is now 25 days until the final two original Sherlock Holmes casefiles written by Arthur Conan Doyle enter the public domain.
At the time of this posting, it is now 12 days until the final two original Sherlock Holmes casefiles written by Arthur Conan Doyle enter the public domain.
That’s why the name “Herlock Sholmes” was used in the American localisation of The Great Ace Attorney, yes, though it’s not the origin of the name. The copyright drama that created Herlock Sholmes goes all the way back to the early 1900s.
In brief, Maurice Leblanc, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, wanted to publish a series of crossover stories with his own gentleman thief character, Arsène Lupin. However, in spite of the fact that Doyle had come to detest Holmes by that point in his career, he liked the thought of Holmes losing to Lupin even less (and he knew that Leblanc would never allow Holmes to win), and thus objected.
Leblanc responded by inventing the conspicuously similar – but legally distinct! – character of Herlock Sholmès (later renamed Holmlock Shears) and published the crossovers anyway.
At the time of this posting, it is now 3 days until the final two original Sherlock Holmes casefiles written by Arthur Conan Doyle enter the public domain.
The final two original Sherlock Holmes casefiles written by Arthur Conan Doyle are now in the public domain.
at the risk of sounding like a raving lunatic, i think one of my favorite trekkie memes/posts is that one where someone comments on a screenshot of tos and asks if sulu is texting, because it PERFECTLY encapsulates star trekās strange little place at the intersection of pop culture and the tech world:
like listenā¦ 55+ years ago a bunch of actors had to use a mix of existing habits and wild imagination to come up with what they felt would be believable movements and muscle-memory for someone using completely unbelievable tech a few hundred years in the future. like tv had less than ten channels and the screen was a foot across, and they had to go āok how would someone whoās used to a tiny wireless gadget with a screen hold it and use it? how would they talk to a computer? how would the computer sound when she talked back?ā
and over half a century later our own tech has surpassed the clunky retrofuture gizmos in so many ways, no doubt inspired by it, that now someone two decades into the 21st century sees an actor in the 60s holding some tiny rectangular plastic prop in both hands and immediately recognizes it as āoh, suluās texting!ā now THAT is a called shot. hell, thatās putting your money on a roulette wheel in a casino that hasnāt been built yet. i LOVE it. itās so star trek. sulu is absolutely texting.
