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Editorial

The Legacy of Baker Street

Eventually, time will have its way with Sherlock Holmes, and he will pass fully into the public domain. In America, that bow to posterity will come sometime in 2023. Until then, Holmes is privately owned, and the subject of an uncongenial dispute among the descendants of Arthur Conan Doyle over who controls the rights to his venerable detective, whose last adventure appeared in print in 1927. The details of the squabble over the estate are less important than the lesson to be drawn from it.

Sherlock Holmes is a vivid example of what happens when copyright is repeatedly extended. In 1976, an extension of the term of copyright for intellectual property gave Conan Doyle’s daughter an opportunity to recapture the right to her father’s legacy in America, which would otherwise have entered the public domain. The term has since been extended further, and there is every prospect of more battles to keep extending it.

The reason might simply be called “The Adventures of the Cash Cow.” The various claimants to the Conan Doyle estate argue that they are protecting the Holmes legacy. But you have to look no further than the local movie theater, where the new “Sherlock Holmes” is playing, to realize that the real goal is protecting a lucrative franchise. The movie is a lot of fun, but Holmes himself — the master of the cerebral has been turned into a brawling action hero — could not be more irreverently served if he were already in the public domain.

The law gives an author and the author’s descendants more than adequate control over creative work — a minimum of the author’s life plus 70 years. The public is better served if copyrights have a reasonable limit. Sherlock Holmes should belong to us all right now.

A correction was made on 
Feb. 8, 2010

An editorial on Jan. 24 about the extensions of copyrights in the United States gave the wrong date for the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes adventure. The last stories were published in 1927, not 1914.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section WK, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Legacy of Baker Street. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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