Public Domain, My Dear Watson Lawsuit Challenges Conan Doyle Copyrights

Some 125 years after his first appearance, Sherlock Holmes remains a hot literary property, inspiring thousands of pastiches, parodies and sequels in print, to saying nothing of the hit Warner Bros. film starring Robert Downey Jr. and such television series as “Elementary” and the BBC’s “Sherlock.”

But according to a civil complaint filed on Thursday in federal court in Illinois by a leading Holmes scholar, many licensing fees paid to the Arthur Conan Doyle estate have been unnecessary, since the main characters and elements of their story derived from materials published before January 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law.

The complaint was filed by Leslie S. Klinger, the editor of the three-volume, nearly 3,000-page “Annotated Sherlock Holmes” and numerous other Cnan Doyle-related books. It stems from “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,” a collection of Holmes-related stories by various authors, edited by Mr. Klinger and Laurie R. King, herself the author of a successful mystery series featuring Mary Russell, Holmes’s wife.

The complaint claims that Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd., a business entity organized in Great Britain, sent a letter in December to Pegasus Books suggesting it would prevent “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes” from being sold by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and “similar retailers” unless it received a licensing fee. In a telephone interview, Mr. Klinger said he had reluctantly paid a $5,000 fee for a similar collection he edited with Ms. King, “A Study in Sherlock,” published by Random House in 2011, even though he believed it wasn’t legally necessary.

“I didn’t want to pay it then,” Mr. Kli! nger said, adding: “Enough is enough. This time it was really too big a threat.”

The complaint asks that the court make a declaratory judgment establishing that the basic “Sherlock Holmes story elements” are in the public domain, a point that some have previously argued, if not in court. The Conan Doyle estate’s American literary agent and lawyer did not immediately respond to request for comment.

In a statement posted online at Free-Sherlock.com, Mr. Klinger said he was not trying to interfere with the estate’s legitimate rights, noting that the stories in the new collection avoided drawing on elements introduced in any of the 10 Holmes stories published after Jan. 1, 1923, which remain under copyright until 2023.

The complaint also did not challenge the fact that Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd., was “the sole and exclusive owner” of the material that remains under copyright. The Conan Doyle copyrights have been the subect of intense legal wrangling over the years, leading some creators to pay licensing fees to what they later realized was the wrong party.