The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has been claiming that, even though most of the Sherlock Holmes stories are out of copyright, a few are old enough to fall under the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions,^* so the whole character falls under copyright.

The appellate court ruled against them and now the Supreme Court has denied cert, effectively ending the case in favor of the public domain:

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan refused on Thursday afternoon to block a federal appeals court ruling against continued copyright protection for fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, for any stories about him that have entered the public domain. Kagan acted without even asking for a response from an author who is preparing a new Holmes anthology, and she gave no explanation for her denial of a stay.

The nickel tour of the original case is here:

The estate has been attempting to block a California lawyer and Holmes fancier, Leslie S. Klinger, from publishing a new book about the two characters unless he is willing to get a license from the estate and pay a fee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the estate’s copyright claim, calling it “quixotic.” The new filing at the Court, including the Seventh Circuit’s ruling as an appendix, has been docketed as 14A47, and can be read here.

………

Doyle has been dead for eighty-four years, but because of extensions of copyright terms, ten of his fifty-six short stories continue to be protected from copying. All of the short stories and four novels were published between 1887 and 1927, but all of the collection except ten short stories have entered into the public domain as copyrights expired.

The Doyle estate, though, is pressing a quite unusual copyright theory. It contends that, since Doyle continued to develop the characters of Holmes and Watson throughout all of the stories, the characters themselves cannot be copied even for what Doyle wrote about them in the works that are now part of the public domain and thus ordinarily would be fair game for use by others.

It’s nice that cockamamie IP theories are no longer getting judicial deference.

^*I mean that literally. Disney has been vociferous in lobbying for copyright extensions to ensure that the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, remain out of the public domain.