Judge Posner Solves a Mystery

In a decision rejecting the Conan Doyle Estate's claim to control the characters Sherlock Holmes and so forth, Posner ruled that the estate sought “near-perpetual copyright” . The estate sought to use a current split in the copyright terms of Doyle's works to argue that because some works describing the character were protected that should extend to blocking any use of the character whose complexity is revealed in the later works. Yeah, not so much.