Why We Celebrate When Copyright Expires
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Belatedly, happy New Year! Here in the Books department, we like to make an extra toast for a concurrent holiday, Public Domain Day. Every January 1, the copyright protection expires on a long list of novels, movies, songs, and other works, which are then available to remix or recycle into derivative stories (the way that Disney turned a Hans Christian Andersen tale into The Little Mermaid). This year heralds the liberation in the United States of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the song “Singin’ in the Rain,” the earliest versions of Popeye and Tintin, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. (The groundbreaking essay, now free to publish, is being reissued in at least three new editions, including one introduced by The Atlantic’s Xochitl Gonzalez). This freedom, however, is hard-won and can be incomplete. The decades-old tussle over when a creative work becomes public property opens up deeper questions about how to balance the rights of the artist against the common good. This week, Alec Nevala-Lee examined the curious case of Sherlock Holmes.
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Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective first appeared in 1890 and unambiguously shed U.S. copyright in 2023, but for at least half a century, artists have been wrangling with Doyle’s estate over who was allowed to depict the character, and when. As Nevala-Lee writes, “Over the four decades during which Doyle wrote the original stories, international copyright was rapidly evolving.” The estate benefited from a 1998 U.S. law that extended older copyrights by as many as 25 years. (It was derisively nicknamed “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” because Disney was a key advocate and beneficiary.)
That extension covered only 10 of Doyle’s stories, but the estate pushed for even more protection by establishing a new line of argument: Because Holmes was changing right up through the last scene Doyle wrote, its representatives claimed, his copyright’s expiration countdown began only with the publication of the last batch. They lost that case in 2013, but continued to make licensing deals with producers of works reinterpreting Holmes and even sued the creators of two more projects in 2015 and 2020. (Both suits were likely privately settled.) The stakes are even higher for the rights-holders of some more recent works: Marvel and DC Comics, for example, currently control classic superheroes originally invented in the 1930s (such as Batman and Superman), who now bring in billions. Facing their own looming public-domain deadlines, those companies seem poised to adopt a version of the Doyle estate’s strategy, which a DC lawyer described in 2001 as “keep ’em fresh and up to date.” As Nevala-Lee writes, “Although the Holmes copyright debacle has finally expired, it offers a preview of even more contentious battles to come.”
If public-domain defenders are to prevail over deep-pocketed fights to hold on to lucrative copyrights in near-perpetuity, they might have to remind the public of why copyrights expire in the first place. They could point to the many examples of derivative work that is not only genuinely creative but in fact enriches and broadens the cultural landscape. Think of the way West Side Story brought Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a bustling, diverse, and radically different cultural setting. Or consider Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, one of five mind-expanding books recommended last week by Ilana Masad. Rhys’s 1966 response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre fleshes out the backstory of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Mr. Rochester’s attic, to tell an original tale about the toll of Caribbean colonialism. “Rhys’s project deals with Jane Eyre specifically,” Masad writes, “but her intervention asks us to consider other great literature in its historical and political context as well.” The novel is no less original for having been sparked by another. Like the plays of Shakespeare, who stole shamelessly himself, it serves as strong evidence that nothing will come of nothing. “Creativity,” Nevala-Lee writes, “doesn’t follow the logic of copyright law.”
How Sherlock Holmes Broke Copyright Law
By Alec Nevala-Lee
Adaptations of Holmes stories are exploding now that the detective is in the public domain. Critics believe it should have happened decades ago.
What to Read
Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong
Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another. — Ruth Madievsky
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Your Weekend Read
‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’
By Nancy Walecki
On the way to Topanga Canyon, Dad and I stopped to watch the fire burn. The flames were coming into a neighborhood where two of my childhood friends grew up, just beyond the Pacific Palisades, where the blaze had started. The way the fire was burning, I couldn’t imagine that the Palisades was still standing. The main road was closed—these winds can dislodge rocks and rain them down on cars—so we took back streets. “You can tell people are emotional from the way they’re driving,” Dad said, after someone whipped around a blind turn. We made it to the house of a friend, another old-timer who, like Dad, had lived through the 1993 fire, the one that got so close, it warped the double-pane glass in my childhood home. He told us he’d be fine, based on the way the wind was blowing, and offered to make us a pot of coffee while he still had power—he’d heard they’d be shutting it off in the next hour. Dad said it looked like the flames had reached the mouth of Topanga Canyon, and our friend promised he’d get ready to evacuate. “But nothing will ever be as bad as ’93,” he said.
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