Book People Archive

Re: Status of LoTR --> Sherlock Holmes?

Charles Hall wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, John Mark Ockerbloom wrote:
> 
>> an Australian site.  And in the "life+70 years" countries, such as those
> > in the EU, the copyrights of authors who died in 1930 re-entered the public
> > domain, so Sherlock Holmes, for one, can now roam freely on the
> > fiber-optic streets of London once again.
> 
> Surely Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain already! Were any written
> after 1925?? Or is there more to this story than that?

By "roaming freely on the streets of London", I simply
meant that the copyrights to the Holmes stories, and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's other work, had expired *in the UK*.  Unlike in the US,
where copyrights to older books are generally tied to the date that copyright
is secured (usually the date the work is published), copyrights in the UK,
and in most other countries, are generally tied to the date that the
author died.

Conan Doyle died in 1930.  The UK used to be a "life plus 50 years"
country [rounded up, as in most countries, to the end of a calendar year]
so his copyrights originally expired there at the start of 1981.
After joining the European Union, the UK was required to retroactively
extend copyrights to "life plus 70 years" (again, rounded up).  Unlike
the situation in the US, where copyright extensions simply froze the
public domain for some number of years, European countries actually had
to roll back their public domain.  So Doyle's works went back into copyright
in the mid-1990s, and that longer copyright term then expired again at the
end of 2000 (1930 plus 70 years).

In the US, on the other hand, most of the Holmes stories have been
in the public domain for a long time.  But there are a few exceptions:
a few stories that appear in _The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes_
weren't published anywhere until after 1922-- for example, "The
Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" wasn't published until 1927.
These stories, as far as I know, are still copyrighted in the US,
and therefore my link to _The Case Book..._ goes to an Australian
site, and warns US readers not to follow it.

Incidentally, I got the publication information above from a very
comprehensive on-line bibliography of Holmes stories and derivative works
called _The Universal Sherlock Holmes_.  It's at

  http://special.lib.umn.edu/rare/ush/ush.html  

Sherlockians may be interested in checking it out, if they don't
already know about it.

John