On Mourning the Passing of Barnes & Noble (An American Editor)
After this week’s news that Barnes & Noble has lost money yet again, I decided that perhaps I should begin thinking about writing B&N’s obituary. After all, I am a B&N member and I buy a lot of books from B&N and I will miss it when the last store and website is finally shuttered.
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Conan Doyle Estate Asks Supreme Court to Put Sherlock Holmes Back Under Copyright (Techdirt)
Back in June the 7th Circuit appeals court ruled that Holmes was in the public domain, followed up by a more thorough slamming of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate in a follow-up ruling concerning rewarding attorneys’ fees. We saw some reporters claim that the case was now “over,” but that was clearly not true.
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EU High Court Dashes Hopes for Lower Taxes on eBooks (The Digital Reader)
The European Court of Justice released a new ruling last week that will keep ebook prices higher in Europe.
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Scholastic Publishes ‘Open a World of Possible’ Anthology as a Free eBook (GalleyCat)
Scholastic has published a free eBook entitled Open a World of Possible: Real Stories About the Joy and Power of Reading to celebrate the launch of its new literacy initiative.
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Kindle Daily Deal: Stacy Justice Mystery Series (and others)
That Sherlock Holmes decision matters a lot. Without it, a popular literary estate could hoard an author’s unpublished writings, even short stories, and release them only when the copyright on a character is about to expire. That could extend the copyright protection on that character, and hence the effective copyright of all the books about him, literally for centuries. Each new story released could add 90 years to an entire corpus. A mere 10 unpublished stories could extend that copyright out some 900 years.
That’s crazy!
That is a very good point I had not thought of. I think the original decision was very fair—they said that you could use the Sherlock Holmes characters, but that any details which were exclusive to those final stories could not be used. Personally, I think life of the author plus 50 years is more than fair. We are talking about Conan Doyle’s very distant descendants here. If they want to profit off of Sherlock Holmes, they can write their own works about him, the same way Tolkien’s son did. And their works would be covered by their own copyrights.
Conan Doyle’s son Adrian actually collaborated with the author John Dickson Carr on a book of Holmes and Watson stories — The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes — published in 1954. The stories are uneven in quality, but then so are the originals.