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Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules

theguardian.com

51–54 of 54 posts

Re: Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules

#51
post #39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this shocking? Sherlock predates Mickey by 41 years.

No, the Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1927. Steamboat Willie is from 1928. Copyright law in the US is basically built around Mickey Mouse. Sherlock Holmes seems to barely make the cut into public domain.

The first volume of Sherlock Holmes stories was published in 1887.

Re: Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules

#52
post #34

Some real absolutely timeless classic stories are available in the public domain right now. If I had more time, money and passion, I'd be the RMS of the public domain. In my mind it's the free-est a work can possibly be. Unencumbered by licensing or copyright (or copyleft) considerations. You like it? Use it for whatever you want in whatever way you want. One of my friends was looking for something to read, had an ol…

Many of Robert E Howard's Conan stories are in the public domain now, due to renewals not being performed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian#Copyright_a...

Re: Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules

#53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for a great post. My family will have lots of good stuff to read when we go on vacation!

I can't recall the exact process, but you can bookmark a certain Project Gutenberg page on the Kindle that puts basically all of their works at your fingertips. May I also plug Distributed Proofreaders ( http://www.pgdp.net/ ), which is a major source of primary source documents to Project Gutenberg. It is the power of the global community of internet citizens who digitize scanned documents that are difficult or impo…

Good plug. Joined!

Re: Sherlock lives in public domain, US court rules

#54
post #34

Some real absolutely timeless classic stories are available in the public domain right now. If I had more time, money and passion, I'd be the RMS of the public domain. In my mind it's the free-est a work can possibly be. Unencumbered by licensing or copyright (or copyleft) considerations. You like it? Use it for whatever you want in whatever way you want. One of my friends was looking for something to read, had an ol…

One note on Verne -- a lot of early Verne translations (e.g. the ones in the public domain) have really lousy English translations. Big things, like sections being excised because they seemed anti-England, and little things like metric units not being converted to English (screwing up Verne's careful math). So while it's nice to have them free, you'd actually do yourself a favor of getting a modern translation when available, even if you have to pay for it.
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