Sherlock Holmes: Judge Declares Popular Detective in Public Domain

The Conan Doyle estate argued that to deny copyright on the whole character would be to give the detective "multiple personalities." Sherlock Holmes is not dead. The BBC recently made that clear in a mini-episode for Sherlock. Now, much of what we know about the popular detective character belongs to all. So says a federal judge in Illinois tasked with determining whether a character who first appeared in publication in 1887 could still be in copyright. The lawsuit was brought by Leslie Klinger,...