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kcghost

Lifer
May 6, 2011
13,140
21,409
77
Olathe, Kansas
I've read the stories at least three times. Good stuff.
According to the IHearofSherlockEverywhere podcast you have to be careful of the expiration date of a copyright and a trademark. Copyrights do expire but trademarks are damn near eternal. The only thing that can't be trademarked are the stories themselves.
 

Alejo R.

Part of the Furniture Now
Oct 13, 2020
832
1,643
48
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I've read the stories at least three times. Good stuff.
According to the IHearofSherlockEverywhere podcast you have to be careful of the expiration date of a copyright and a trademark. Copyrights do expire but trademarks are damn near eternal. The only thing that can't be trademarked are the stories themselves.
The entry into the public domain of the stories implies that they can be edited or taken to different formats without having to pay rights. It is now legal to download stories from the internet without paying money. But it does not imply that tomorrow you can launch a Brand of x product called Sherlock Holmes without paying royalties, if someone has already registered the name as a trademark.
 

HawkeyeLinus

Lifer
Oct 16, 2020
5,580
40,853
Iowa
People will still buy the books.

I’m a big Holmes fan, but admit freely that many of the later stories are not up to the standard of the series as it started and grew in popularity.

Dupin and Maigret and Travis McGee and Mike Hammer are the other private and proper detectives I enjoy reading about.

The one I couldn’t get onto was Poirot.
 

Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,759
13,784
Humansville Missouri
My mother’s mother, Myrtle “Ma” Cahow Agee, was born in 1897 and as a gorgeous teen aged girl, and an accomplished mule skinner for her father’s drayage operation, was hired by The Index newspaper at Hermitage Missouri as a reporter.

She wrote almost all the obituaries for The Index and a weekly humorous column about Ma and Pa, and later their two children Sy Thomas and Saydee, and by 1960 was the most famous regional author in the Ozarks.

Almost every character in the Beverley Hillbillies borrowed from her work, right down to the town of Bug Tussle, which is visible from the house I grew up in five miles West of Humansville.

The owners of The Index wanted to bring suit, but my grandmother refused to cooperate. She was flattered by the fact they used her life’s work for inspiration.

The producers of the Beverley Hillbillies paid Ma Agee $400 as a pre order for 200 copies of a book that was to be under her name for copyright, in 1963. She in turn paid Nanny Jenkins to illustrate it, and The Index half the sale price of $2 a copy to publish it. She’d been well paid by The Index, but her book sales gave her financial independence until she died.

Plus the Beverley Hillbillies sent my grandfather cartons of Winston cigarettes, hoping that Pa would start smoking Winstons in the Ma and Pa series.

Pa tried them there fancy filter tailor mades, but he jest couldn’t get over his love ‘o that Long Green he raised hizownself.:)

I’m the literary executor of Ma Agee, who died in 1980.

It’s an incredibly complex question if The Index still holds a valid copyright on Ma, Pa, Sy Thomas and Saydee.

All it took in 1960 to avoid it was to change the names to Jed, Granny, Jethro Bodine, and Ellie Mae Clampett and have them load up the truck and move to Beverley Hills.:)

Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?


 
Last edited:

mso489

Lifer
Feb 21, 2013
41,210
60,433
I'm not steeped in Holmes, though I've seen his "neighborhood" in London and several of the dramatizations over the years. As I recall, Doyle had Sherlock die in what was supposed to be a final story, because he was tired of cranking out the writing. But the public clamor and financial incentives were so strong, he had to revive the character, explaining away Sherlock's death, and having him continue on further cases. As an acting assignment, Sherlock has always been a challenge and seems to attract eccentric and highly diverse interpretations. He was an odd bird. In a very different way and culture, a sort of early-day Columbo.
 

greysmoke

Starting to Get Obsessed
Thanks for sharing... I hadn't known. I read his stories one after the other as a youngster. I note Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Hemingway's Men Without Women, and even the Hardy Boys Tower Treasure are also on the long list of public domain books, music, and movies.