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from the who-was-not-a-Jeopardy-contestant dept.
SCOTUSblog tells us:
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.
More background on the case and details about the filing in this detailed earlier SCOTUSblog post which notes:
[Sir Arthur Conan] 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.
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Saturday July 19 2014, @03:45PM
Very interesting. So what's the import for fan fiction? It's ok to create, just not for commercial purposes?
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday July 19 2014, @03:53PM
Fan fiction violates trademark laws, but most trademark owners don't do anything about it because they'd be pissing off their own fans and generating ill will. They tolerate fan fiction as long as it's mostly on the down low.
Now if you sold your own stories under their trademark, they'd lawyer up and you'd play Alderaan to their Death Star. So if I wrote and published a Star Wars novel for sale, George Lucas--wait, Disney--would come after me.
As an intellectual property owner, you have to defend your trademark or it isn't taken seriously.
If you reproduced someone's work, you'd be violating copyright law. You'd be disseminating their copyrighted works.
As always, don't take my comments as legal or medical advice. If you want flower arranging advice, consult a Zen monk.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by jbWolf on Sunday July 20 2014, @05:58AM
It isn't just fan fiction writers that have to worry. I wrote a long Star Wars parody, published it on the Internet, and I constantly worry about what "The Mouse" will think. Here's an interesting tidbit from an article [creators.com] I ran across:
Wanting to publish my parody, I finally decided to address this issue directly and wrote a letter to Disney in my website [jb-wolf.com] on the same page that I offer my story. (Scroll down to the very bottom on that link.)
All the craziness with trademarked names and perpetual copyrights has led to me to wonder what would be optimal. What should we be targeting as an optimal set of laws concerning copyrights, patents, and trademarks? That's not something I see too often so I also decided to address that in my website as well. I've presented some ideas that I think would be interesting to talk about with others and (once ideas are more flushed out), ultimately present to Congress as a larger group.
www.jb-wolf.com [jb-wolf.com]