“Emotional” Sherlock Holmes Not in Public Domain: Conan Doyle Estate in Lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

“Emotional” Sherlock Holmes Not in Public Domain: Conan Doyle Estate in Lawsuit

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3 pointswebmobdev6 comments

About the turn of the twentieth century, American actor William Gillette was writing a stage play about Sherlock Holmes. Gillette wrote to Conan Doyle asking if he would object to Gillette having Holmes get married in the play. Doyle wrote back telling Gillette he could marry Holmes, murder Holmes, or do whatever he wanted to do with Holmes. (Story told in Vincent Starrett's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes [Macmillan, New York, 1933].)

What ludicrousness. An artists right should die with them or survive only 25-30 years from creation after their death.

I mean, I think there's value in protecting a continuing enterprise. Most of the fault of our copyright laws fall on Disney. And to be honest: I think it's okay if Disney retains a near-perpetual copyright on Mickey Mouse, as they're actively continuing to build on and produce content, and otherwise exploit that resource.

I am most irritated about copyright holding on abandoned works. If a book or game or movie is not republished, continued, redistributed, etc. by the copyright holder for a number of years, I feel like their copyright should expire so that others may do as they wish to copy and distribute and build on.

I think there's a place a line could be drawn there: I feel Disney tends to use and continue and redistribute their assets for a very long time. If you want them, you can find them. I don't feel like Conan Doyle's estate should be able to basically copyright troll and just solicit license fees... if it was truly interested in maintaining control of Sherlock Holmes, it would be actively pursuing new stories from within itself, not just trying to tax people who create new content.

The easiest way I’ve thought of to do this is simply to have companies pay to keep their copyright. And have it scale with time.

You get... 20 years? If you want 21, it costs 1,000. If you want year 100, it costs 1,000,000. Some sort of scale to it. If something isn’t worth 1,000, let the public have it. And the older it is, the more you need to justify its value. Disney is the perfect example. They pay some price, maybe 50M/yr to keep their multi billion dollar enterprise afloat seems a good trade off for the public good. I’m sure there are much better numbers but if you aren’t willing to put any skin into owning your copyrights, the public should get them. Having culture as a whole perpetually owned is not healthy.

This is a good idea. How to implement it would be tricky as Disney is just one example of a copyright holder (that does tend to go overboard). What about someone poor who has inherited a copyright to say a musical piece that isn't commercial yet but s/he would like to work on and expand one day? Would this idea impact them negatively?

Probably but this seems like the most edge of edge cases.

Also if it got popular, the recording would still be copyrighted.

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