Current

Sherlock Holmes, footloose and copyright-free

Leave a comment

[Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer or an expert on copyright law. If you have legal questions, go talk to a pro.]

Silhouette of Sherlock Holmes
Source. (CC-BY-NC 4.0)

You may have heard that the United States copyright on Sherlock Holmes expired with the arrival of the New Year.

You may have also heard something similar ten or so years ago (such as this 2013 news story). Why are we going through this again in 2023?

You may also wonder how a character created in 1887—136 years ago—could have been copyrighted up until a few days back. Did all those recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations (Sherlock, Elementary, Mr. Holmes, Enola Holmes, etc.) pay a license fee to someone? Who was collecting the money?

And did I pay a license fee to publish my Sherlock Holmes book, A Man Named Baskerville?

The short summary is this:

The character of Sherlock Holmes, and most of his stories, have been in the public domain since the late 1990’s. However, Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary estate—which represents a few distant descendants—continued to insist that the character remained in copyright, and so authors and filmmakers kept paying a license fee to produce derivative works. The final batch of Holmes stories entered the public domain in 2023, but it remains to be seen if the estate will cease to claim it holds rights to depictions of him.

And, no, I did not purchase a license to publish my book last year. Here’s why.

Of the books I’ve written, A Man Named Baskerville required the most research. I studied Victorian idioms and writing patterns, the history of the Empire of Brazil, the British peerage, dog breeding and training, and the ecosystem of the Dartmoor bogs. I read and reread (and reread) the source story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. None of this was a chore.

A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

However, I also spent a frustrating amount of time researching whether I needed to pay a license fee to publish my book. That research drew out to a confounding and depressing study in modern greed.

This is what I learned:

In the United States, the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have been in the public domain for decades now. The earliest Holmes stories fell out of copyright in 1998, when U.S. legislation declared works published prior to 1923 were automatically in the public domain. That magic year—1923—was “frozen” until 2019, when the public-domain clock began moving forward. Today, the magic public domain cut-off date is 1927.

(This is an important distinction: The characters of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, etc. were placed in the public domain in 1998, even though some of the later stories remained under copyright. As you’ll see, the Doyle literary estate played up this confusion for their own ends.)

The first Sherlock Holmes stories were published in 1887. The bulk of them were published prior to 1923. You’d think authors and filmmakers have been free for decades now to produce new Sherlock Holmes works. You would be wrong, in a way.

The complication stems from Doyle’s writing history. Although he killed off Holmes in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” he returned to the character in The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialized in 1901–1902) and brought the detective back to life in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” Doyle continued producing Holmes stories and novels until 1927—meaning he produced four years’ worth of work that remained copyrighted though the end of 2022.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Astoundingly, the Doyle literary estate did not stop insisting after 1998 that depictions of Sherlock Holmes required a license. Their logic was that since some of the Sherlock Holmes stories remained copyrighted, the estate still held rights to the character. What’s more, they asserted any depiction of a “rounded” Sherlock Holmes—that is, a Sherlock Holmes with feelings—was also copyrighted. (It’s preposterous, and I won’t go into their reasoning here.)

These specious claims crashed into a wall of common sense thanks to author Leslie S. Klinger suing the estate in 2013. Klinger had previously paid a $5,000 licensing fee to publish his first Sherlock Holmes book. He refused to pay for his second book; the Doyle estate threatened to prevent the book’s distribution. Judge Richard Posner recounted the estate’s threats in his findings:

[The estate] did not mince words … “If you proceed … to bring out [the sequel] unlicensed, do not expect to see it offered for sale by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers. We work with those compan[ies] routinely to weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes from their offerings, and will not hesitate to do so with your book as well.”

Posner excoriated Doyle’s estate, calling their actions “a form of extortion”:

The Doyle estate’s business strategy is plain: charge a modest license fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the “rational” writer or publisher asked for the fee will pay it rather than incur a greater cost, in legal expenses, in challenging the legality of the demand.

Posner also tossed out the estate’s attempt to extend their copyright via the last remaining stories, as well as their “Sherlock Holmes with feeling” claim. He said their appeal “bordered on the quixotic.”

This is why, when the suit was settled, news sources in 2013—ten years ago—were printing headlines like “Finally, Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain.” Considering Posner’s scathing dressing-down of the estate, you’d think the matter was settled. Again, you would be wrong.

Unabated and shameless, the Doyle literary estate continued to squeeze payments from authors and filmmakers. One victim of this bogus “Sherlock Holmes with feeling” copyright was the 2015 film Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellan. Another was the Netflix production of Enola Holmes. The final 2020 settlement details are undisclosed, but I wager Netflix paid the Doyle estate rather than continue with a protracted lawsuit—exactly the shakedown Posner described in his Klinger decision.

With the passing of 2022, articles blossom again with proclamations that the master detective is finally in the public domain—“Now anybody can write a Sherlock Holmes story.” Actually, anybody could have written a Holmes story since 1998—it’s only due to an insufferable and insatiable literary estate that anyone would think otherwise.

Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellan
Mr. Holmes movie poster

With the entire Sherlock Holmes corpus now in the public domain, this must close the door on the estate’s claims, right? I’m dubious. The Doyle estate has been told at least twice in the past (in 1998, again in 2013) they do not hold a copyright on the detective. That did not stop them from abusing their namesake’s prestige to squeeze money out of creators.

If you think I’m being cynical, consider that the estate continues, in 2023, to solicit license fees from prospective Holmes authors. A separate agency solicits licenses for Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and merchandise—even though generic depictions of the detective are entirely in the public domain and do not require a license. The literary estate’s web site is polished and professionally-produced. You could not blame a naive author wandering onto it and concluding they must pay a license fee to publish a Sherlock Holmes book.

And if you think I was being paranoid or overly self-important worrying that the Doyle estate would come after me, recall that they were more than happy to take Leslie Klinger—an independent author you may not have heard of before—all the way to the 7th Circuit court of appeals. Remember what they told him: “Do not expect to see [your book] offered for sale by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers. We work with those companies routinely to weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes.” Would Amazon’s algorithm automatically ban or blacklist my book because it did not carry a license from the Doyle estate?

And if that sounds farfetched, know that several years ago Amazon informed me that they would de-list my first novel because its description contained the phrase “Star Wars.” They didn’t care that my novel centers on the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics. I removed the phrase from my description, and the book continues to be sold online. I’m not happy about that, though.

With all that in mind, I decided to risk it. The strength of the Klinger decision convinced me the Doyle estate did not hold the copyright to Sherlock Holmes, that I didn’t need to obtain a license, that I didn’t need to wait until 2023 to publish A Man Named Baskerville—that I was entirely free to take the original Baskerville story and re-shape and re-imagine it from the perspective of the villain himself. That’s exactly what I did.


. Last updated .

Flight of the Big Blue Bird

Leave a comment
Twitter logo

I’ve been bird-watching. I’ve followed the events at Twitter this week with a morbid fascination: Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter HQ bearing a sink; the outrage at a billionaire buying up a major cultural outlet (which overlooks all the other billionaires making similar purchases, and most of all, that Twitter itself help make founder Jack Dorsey one, but for some reason, this time is different); the questionable sagacity of predicting Twitter is doomed after a mere seven days of changing hands (this from the same media that told us the Twitter sale itself was doomed from the outset); the layoff of half of Twitter’s workforce; and a notable, but not mass, migration to Mastodon, a Twitter lookalike with a more distributed modus operandi (and no billionaire owner).

I’ve been on Mastodon since 2018. I’ve never liked the Pepsi-or-Coke situation with Twitter and Facebook, so I dipped my toe in the Mastodon waters four years ago in the hope of finding a better situation. I didn’t. My Mastodon feed was tumbleweeds, mostly cat photos and random musings on how much better Mastodon is than Twitter. The way to build your Mastodon feed is to follow more people, but I could find no one there I knew or cared to follow—and if I did, they were on Twitter too, so might as well follow them there.

My dusty Mastodon feed greened in the past week. It has more interesting content now, and my own messages (“toots” in Mastodon parlance) are getting some engagement as well.

With the growth comes growing pains. I’m already having a knee-jerk hipster reaction to the increased traffic there, similar to that sinking feeling one gets when your favorite cafe tucked away in a quiet neighborhood gets Yelped.

Mastodon logo
Mastodon

Worse, I’m already starting to see the kind of toots my Twitter feed was flooded with a few years ago: Smug, taunting, highly-politicized messages supposedly proving how people not-like-the-message’s-author are idiots. This was one of the reasons I wanted to find an alternative to Twitter in 2018.

(How did I halt the flow of those messages on Twitter? I stopped following people who retweeted those kinds of messages. Harsh, yes, but if you’re repeatedly propagating material I don’t want to read, I reserve the right to stop following you. The Twitter algorithm picked up on my change of reading habits, and pretty soon that kind of content disappeared from my feed.)

The real question is if this mild shift in traffic snowballs into the Mass Twitter Migration of 2022 that leads to its collapse.

I’m not holding my breath. Twitter has tremendous inertial energy behind it, no matter its ownership. The blue-checked accounts and users with six-digit-plus followers have a ton of investment in the system. Ten percent of Twitter users produce 90% of its content. Power users are a big draw, and I don’t see any of them packing their bags quite yet.

Mostly, I think those capable and willing to leave Twitter won’t. They’ll simply maintain one more social media account. Most people already juggle Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. Adding one more to the mix might be annoying, but it’s hardly some massive additional investment of time. And if people are active on both Twitter and Mastodon, then—surprise!—Twitter lives.

My Mastodon account is here. More information on joining Mastodon is here.


.

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE book tour starts now

Leave a comment

The A Man Named Baskerville book tour is underway! As the above graphic shows, the tour is making stops at several spots around the book-reading web. I’m working with Escapist Tours, who have been an able hand in putting together all the finishing touches.

Throughout the week, several well-known book reviewers and bloggers will be discussing Baskerville. I’ll post here as the tour stops along the way, and what these great and generous readers have to say.

If you’re curious, learn more about A Man Named Baskerville here. It’s my take on the classic Sherlock Holmes novel retold from a brand-new perspective. As I like to say, I peered into the Arthur Conan Doyle book and realized there was another book within the book—another story waiting to be told.

And if you’d like to read A Man Named Baskerville, consider signing up for the giveaway: I’m raffling off one digital edition of the book at the conclusion of the tour. To sign up, just follow this link.


.

Kindle Vella at Always Be Publishing

Leave a comment
Kindle Vella sample title page

Over at my Substack newsletter, I’ve posted a broad summary of what we know about Amazon’s newest publishing platform, Kindle Vella. A quick summary:

Kindle Vella is a new pay-as-you-go platform for serialized fiction. …

Vella is structured for publishing stories one “episode” at a time. Amazon doesn’t use the word “chapter”—I’ll discuss this below—but, for now, that’s a handy way to think of Vella’s episodes.

Each episode is 600 to 5,000 words. (Amazon’s numbers are so specific, I assume this range is enforced by their software.) Readers can read the first three episodes of a story for free.

If they want to continue reading, readers purchase Vella tokens to unlock additional episodes.

Will I be writing for Kindle Vella? I’m not certain yet. Serialized fiction is more than releasing a new chapter every week. Writers like Dickens and Armistead Maupin succeeded with serializations because they understood how to feed readers details a drop or two at a time, and keep them wanting for more. It’s an art that seemed lost until recently, when episodic fiction began to make a comeback online.

I’ve written before that I see self-publishing as an experiment, and so this is one more experiment I’m considering. We’ll see.

Read more about what Kindle Vella is and is not over at Always Be Publishing.


.

Why I wrote a novel about COVID-19

Leave a comment
Man in the Middle, by Jim Nelson

At Washington Independent Review of Books, author Tara Laskowski asks, “We’re living through a pandemic. Must we read about one, too?” Her suggestion to fellow writers:

Perhaps the solution is to just skip ahead and set everything in 2025, safely away from the horror that is this year …

In 20 years or so, this point will probably be moot. By then, we’ll be ready to curl up with an escapist historical novel set in 2020; we’ll have gotten enough social distance from masks and lockdowns and toilet paper shortages.

My perspective on all this is colored by the fact that I wrote a novel set during 2020, and it centers around the pandemic and quarantines that have affected us all.

To clarify the chronology, I started writing the book in June (or so) and published it last month. Man in the Middle is set in the first week of California’s shelter-in-place, and although March was not so long ago, paging through my diary entries of those early weeks while preparing the novel reminded me just how otherworldly the world became overnight.

That’s a key point about the book’s development: I started keeping a diary when the pandemic surged in America. For the first few months, I wrote daily, almost religiously, dumping my despair and puzzlement onto the page. When the world opened up and grew less tense, I thumbed back through my notebook and discovered a voice I did not quite know. It was me, but it was not a me I easily recognized.

Certainly I harbored many reservations before I set out to write the first draft. Was the world to be swamped with a flood of coronavirus thrillers? What if a cure is discovered tomorrow? One writer friend warned me off the project entirely. From other people, there’s been a split-brain response: On one hand, writing a book now about the pandemic is “obviously” a commercial money-grab on my part, right? On the other hand, the market for such a book has a tight, closing window, once the vaccines arrive, eh? It’s one of those social situations where they think I’m not seeing the obvious, when in fact I’d gone down those thought-paths several dozen times.

I don’t write fiction to make money. Fiction is freeing for me. No one tells me what to write or how to write it. I set my deadlines. I make my own challenges. I also happen to believe there are readers in this world who, once they’re exposed to my writing, will enjoy it as well. That, more than anything, motivates me to keep writing.

Laskowski relates a comment from her agent:

“If something is set this year and is about the quarantine experience, sort of like a locked-room crime, maybe,” she says. “But a medical thriller about covid? Nope.”

A medical thriller is exactly the kind of novel I told myself I would not write: The beautiful epidemiologist racing the clock to develop a cure; a cold-hearted technocracy blocking her progress at every turn; and her unconscious child in a hospital isolation unit hooked up to a respirator. But the reason not to write a medical thriller about coronavirus is not because we’re living through it—it’s because that thriller has been written many times over, only with different strains of disease of different origin, with different symptoms and different cures.

While I didn’t write a locked-room crime book, I knew early on I wanted it to be a novel of isolation and suspense. The year that is 2020 has been a year of unthinkables. It is also a year hosting a major, tumultuous presidential election set against a backdrop of accusations of foreign and domestic intrigue. Swirled together, these ingredients sent me back to the great political and conspiracy films of my youth (Three Days of the Condor, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 12 Monkeys). In January, when COVID-19 was a curiosity mentioned occasionally in the news, I was reading Orwell’s war diaries, which also left a strong impression upon me. In March, when the shelter-in-place orders came down, I reread Camus’ The Plague with fresh eyes and a fresh appreciation.

Out of all this arable soil grew a claustrophobic, paranoid book about an isolated security guard who can’t tell if he’s detaching ever-so-gradually from reality. Podcasts, experts, and so-called experts fill his ears with contradictory takes on the world’s sudden course correction. That voice from my diary was now his.

Why wouldn’t I write that book? Whether or not Man in the Middle succeeds on its merits, I’ll let the readers decide. But how could I just set this inspiration aside and write about any year except 2020?

To return to the original question, no, I don’t believe people should have to read about the pandemic right now. I understand why anyone who reaches for a book today would want to read about any subject other than pandemics. Subconsciously, though, the question naturally bleeds into the territory of, Should writers be writing about the pandemic now?

As an answer, consider re-framing the original question as “We’re living through the Great Depression. Must we read about it, too?”

Imagine if the writers of The Grapes of Wrath, The Day of the Locust, The Road to Wigan Pier, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, John Dos Passos with his U.S.A. trilogy—and more—decided not to write about the worldwide economic collapse because people were living through it, so why would they want to read about it? For many of those authors ninety years ago, they viewed writing about the Great Depression as a responsibility.

Man in the Middle isn’t an act of personal responsibility, but I did write it for good reasons, even if they’re only my reasons.

(Probably unnecessary disclosure: Tara Laskowski is an editor for Smokelong Quarterly, which published one of my stories years ago. I don’t know if she was an editor there at that time.)


. Last updated .

Bikes to Books Spring 2020 virtual tour

Leave a comment

Bikes to Books is a literary bike tour of San Francisco—grab a bike, follow the map, and learn a little about San Francisco’s rich literary history. The tour starts at Jack London Alley and ends at Jack Kerouac Alley, on the way passing all twelve streets named after San Francisco writers. It’s designed to be taken individually or, twice a year in a group led by @enkohl and @burrito_justice.

This spring, for reasons you’ve probably heard about, the bike ride will be done virtually on Twitter rather than in a large group. I’ll be joining the tour this Saturday, live tweeting about the author I read at Bike to Book’s inauguration, Frank Norris (McTeague).

No bike required, no bike helmet required, and no mask required. Join in on Twitter and follow the #BikesToBooks hash tag as @enkohl, @burrito_justice, and more local writers and artists join in reminiscing and reporting on some of the authors that made San Francisco the city it is today.

The virtual ride starts Saturday, May 2nd, from 1pm to 3pm. For more information, check out the announcement at Burrito Justice.


. Last updated .

Books & movies to pick up while social distancing yourself

3 Comments
Albert Camus

Over the past week, the more I tell myself I will not live in fear or succumb to panic, the more I wonder if I’m fooling myself. Such are the unusual times we’re in.

My rule-of-thumb has been to halve whatever heat the press applies to its current hot topic—to recognize it’s in the media’s interests to double a controversial topic’s magnitude to sell more advertising. For the current outbreak of coronavirus, however, dividing by two still yields a large number.

Watching the spread of COVID-19 in near real-time on my computer screen, my thoughts keep returning to a certain class of story, ones that deal with mass disease, plague, and creeping horror.

With social distancing becoming chic and more people staying home nights, here’s a selection of books and movies that offer food for thought for uncertain times:

The Plague

Often read as an allegory of the French Resistance during World War II, it’s just as enriching to read Albert Camus’ classic as a straight accounting of bubonic plague striking an Algerian town.

The novel’s first section reads like a cribbed summary of the past three months. The town government is slow to respond to the first signs of outbreak, and then they attempt to downplay and muzzle news of the disease. The townspeople are initially detached, even sarcastic, about the oncoming epidemic. Doctors hesitate to utter its name. Only when the horror is plain is there a complete lock-down of the city. We haven’t seen food riots or looting—yet—but Camus’ depiction of citizens being shot while escaping quarantine, and paranoia stoking bigotry and violence, naturally makes me wonder which is worse: the disease or its targets.

“A good hour wasted!” the inspector sighed when the door closed behind them. “As you can guess, we’ve other things to think about, what with this fever everybody’s talking of.”

He then asked the doctor if there was any serious danger to the town; Rieux answered that he couldn’t say.

“It must be the weather,” the police officer decided. “That’s what it is.”

What does The Plague depict that we’re not seeing today? Camus’ gallows humor, for one. The San Francisco of thirty years ago would be holding end-of-the-world parties right now, and plague doctors’ masks would be the hot fashion item of the season. Instead, San Francisco went from boom town to ghost town over the course of a single weekend. Camus’ interrogation of God’s will versus nature’s blind force are scarce today too. It appears everyone’s more-or-less agreed on the science behind COVID-19, although conspiracies abound—perhaps our culture’s new religion.

“Well, I know. And I don’t need any post-mortems. I was in China for a good part of my career, and I saw some cases in Paris twenty years ago. Only no one dared to call them by their name on that occasion. The usual taboo, of course; the public mustn’t be alarmed, that would do at all. … ‘It’s unthinkable. Everyone knows it ceased to appear in western Europe.’ Yes, everyone knew that—except the dead men.”

I like to think Camus’ main characters recognized the absurdity of fleas on grungy rats sending an entire city into a locked-down panic. Maybe in the future we’ll have a rounder perspective of the 2019-2020 coronavirus. Not today, apparently.

12 Monkeys

One of my favorite films. In Terry Gilliam’s near future, mankind lives underground after an unnamed virus killed five billion people and made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. A convict is sent backwards in time not to prevent the near-extinction event, but to gather information about the virus so future scientists may develop a vaccine.

“We did it!”
(Jeff Kramer, CC BY 2.0)

As with The Plague, 12 Monkeys is laden with absurdity and irony even though the subject matter is dead-serious. The ending is ambiguous, but one reading is even more fatalistic than Camus’ novel. “All I see are dead people,” the convict mutters as he peers around a thriving 1990s America.

Then there’s the scene where the viral spread is recalled by counting off the cities it was first detected in, much as we’re talking about Wuhan, Italy, King County, and so forth. The 12 Monkeys virus was communicated quickly due to modern airline travel, which again sounds awfully familiar. Of all the titles in this list, 12 Monkeys hews closest to today’s reality.

Orwell’s war-time diaries

While not strictly about plague or pestilence, Orwell’s diaries of London life during World War II have remarkable currency. Reading his private thoughts during the London blitz are Orwell at his most claustrophobic.

Orwell records the daily despairs overheard in pubs and tobacconists, the griping over the stark wartime rationing, and his own dulled sense that he’s grown accustomed to the sound of airplane gunfire. London’s citizens black out their windows and stay at home fretting over the newspaper and beside the radio. Above all, he writes of his suspicions that government censors were holding back embarrassments on England’s progress in the war—and most likely lying through their teeth, although “there is probably more suppression than downright lying.”

The usual Sunday crowds drifting to and fro, perambulators, cycling clubs, people exercising dogs, knots of young men loitering at street corners, with not an indication in any face or in anything that one can overhear that these people grasp that they are likely to be invaded within a few weeks, though today all the Sunday papers are telling them so. The response to renewed appeals for evacuation of children from London has been very poor. Evidently the reasoning is, “The air raids didn’t happen last time, so they won’t happen this time.”

His diaries ring of today’s self-quarantines, the lines at the supermarkets, the daily sense of uncertainty, and each morning checking the Web knowing the infection numbers will only be rising. Our government is now holding public health meetings in secret. At least our press is free enough to report that much.

There are days Orwell sounds resigned to England being overrun by the Nazis, and there are days when he’s even more apocalyptic. Orwell, ever the Socialist, grimly cheers himself up by predicting the end of the war would trigger a workers’ revolution and the end of capitalism. It’s an unusually millenarianist moment for the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, and one where his predictive powers failed him.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The 1956 thriller is a classic of Red Scare film-making. The 1976 remake with Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy is creepier and—improbably—campier. Extraterrestrial spores quietly rain down on Earth to infect humans while they sleep. One by one, humanity is replaced with emotionless, purposeless clones.

The 1956 original is interpreted as either a caution against Communism or anti-Communism, making it the ultimate McCarthy-era open text. The 1976 remake is on several lists of post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers, yet it’s even less politically-charged than the original. As with my suggestion about The Plague, what if both were simply viewed through the lenses of infection and contamination?

When the aliens are perfect clones—when an infected person is outwardly healthy—it’s impossible to know who to be wary of, and so people rely on less reliable and less noble signals to judge unclean. By the middle of Body Snatchers, every major and minor character who comes into the shot leaves you asking, “Are they—?” There’s the awful hesitation these days when people shake hands. There’s the dismalness of watching people scurry away from a blown nose or a sneeze.

Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy’s plea for everyone to listen and see what’s coming sounds eerily like the health care professionals who warned the public of the coming epidemic, especially those who were censored or warned about spreading rumors:

Paranoia—fatalism—taboo—absurdity. I’m not claiming this list will cheer you up. Perhaps it’s helpful to see people at their best and worst when fear is spreading like a disease. Maybe it’s comforting to know we’re not the first to experience this dread. There’s a light, even if it’s not the end of the tunnel.


. Last updated .