Matthew David Brozik wrote here about the December 2013 Holmes copyright expiration decision out of the U.S. District of Illinois shortly after it came out. Go there to understand what the case is about, as I did.
Today that District Court opinion was affirmed by the Seventh Circuit. Here’s a link to the Seventh Circuit opinion.
Highlights:
The appeal challenges the judgment on two alternative grounds. The first is that the district court had no subject-matter jurisdiction because there is no actual case or contro-versy between the parties. The second ground is that if there is jurisdiction, the estate is entitled to judgment on the merits, because, it argues, copyright on a “complex” character in a story, such as Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson, whose full complexity is not revealed until a later story, remains under copyright until the later story falls into the public domain. The estate argues that the fact that early stories in which Holmes or Watson appeared are already in the public do-main does not permit their less than fully “complexified” characters in the early stories to be copied even though the stories themselves are in the public domain.
…
[T]he judge was right to assert (and retain) jurisdiction over the case, and we come to the merits, where the issue as we said is whether copyright protection of a fictional character can be extended beyond the expiration of the copyright on it because the author altered the character in a subse-quent work. In such a case, the Doyle estate contends, the original character cannot lawfully be copied without a li-cense from the writer until the copyright on the later work, in which that character appears in a different form, expires.
We cannot find any basis in statute or case law for extending a copyright beyond its expiration. When a story falls into the public domain, story elements—including characters covered by the expired copyright—become fair game for follow-on authors, as held in Silverman v. CBS Inc., 870 F.2d 40, 49–51 (2d Cir. 1989), a case much like this one. . . The court ruled that “a copyright affords protection only for original works of authorship and, consequently, copyrights in derivative works secure protection only for the incremental additions of originality contributed by the authors of the derivative works.” Id. at 49; see Leslie A. Kurtz, “The Methuselah Factor: When Characters Outlive Their Copyrights,” 11 U. Miami Entertainment & Sports L. Rev. 437, 447–48 (1994). The copyrights on the derivative works, corresponding to the copyrights on the ten last Sherlock Holmes stories, were not extended by virtue of the incremental additions of originality in the derivative works.
And so it is in our case. The ten Holmes-Watson stories in which copyright persists are derivative from the earlier stories, so only original elements added in the later stories remain protected. Id. at 49–50. The “freedom to make new works based on public domain materials ends where the resulting derivative work comes into conflict with a valid copyright,” Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. v. X One X Productions, 644 F.3d 584, 596 (8th Cir. 2011)—as Klinger acknowledges. But there is no such conflict in this case.
Lacking any ground known to American law for asserting post-expiration copyright protection of Holmes and Watson in pre-1923 stories and novels going back to 1887, the estate argues that creativity will be discouraged if we don’t allow such an extension. It may take a long time for an author to perfect a character or other expressive element that first appeared in his early work. If he loses copyright on the original character, his incentive to improve the character in future work may be diminished because he’ll be competing with copiers, such as the authors whom Klinger wishes to anthologize. Of course this point has no application to the present case, Arthur Conan Doyle having died 84 years ago. More important, extending copyright protection is a two-edged sword from the standpoint of inducing creativity, as it would reduce the incentive of subsequent authors to create derivative works (such as new versions of popular fictional characters like Holmes and Watson) by shrinking the public domain. For the longer the copyright term is, the less public-domain material there will be and so the greater will be the cost of authorship, because authors will have to obtain licenses from copyright holders for more material . . .
The estate asks us to distinguish between “flat” and “round” fictional characters, potentially a sharper distinction than the other one it urges (as we noted at the beginning of this opinion), which is between simple and complex. Repeatedly at the oral argument the estate’s lawyer dramatized the concept of a “round” character by describing large circles with his arms. And the additional details about Holmes and Watson in the ten late stories do indeed make for a more “rounded,” in the sense of a fuller, portrayal of these characters. In much the same way we learn things about Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2, in Henry V (though he doesn’t ac-tually appear in that play but is merely discussed in it), and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that were not remarked in his first appearance, in Henry IV, Part 1. Notice also that Henry V, in which Falstaff is reported as dying, precedes The Merry Wives, in which he is very much alive. Likewise the ten last Sherlock Holmes stories all are set before 1914, which was the last year in which the other stories were set. One of the ten, The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger (published in 1927), is set in 1896. See 2 William S. Baring-Gould, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes 453 (1967). Thus a more rounded Holmes or Watson (or Falstaff) is found in a later work depicting a younger person. We don’t see how that can justify extending the expired copyright on the flatter character. A contempo-rary example is the six Star Wars movies: Episodes IV, V, and VI were produced before I, II, and III. The Doyle estate would presumably argue that the copyrights on the characters as portrayed in IV, V, and VI will not expire until the copyrights on I, II, and III expire.
The estate defines “flat” characters oddly, as ones completely and finally described in the first works in which they appear. Flat characters thus don’t evolve. Round characters do; Holmes and Watson, the estate argues, were not fully rounded off until the last story written by Doyle. What this has to do with copyright law eludes us. There are the early Holmes and Watson stories, and the late ones, and features of Holmes and Watson are depicted in the late stories that are not found in the early ones (though as we noted in the preceding paragraph some of those features are retrofitted to the earlier depictions). Only in the late stories for example do we learn that Holmes’s attitude toward dogs has changed—he has grown to like them—and that Watson has been married twice. These additional features, being (we may assume) “original” in the generous sense that the word bears in copyright law, are protected by the unexpired copy-rights on the late stories. But Klinger wants just to copy the Holmes and the Watson of the early stores, the stories no longer under copyright. The Doyle estate tells us that “no workable standard exists to protect the Ten Stories’ incre-mental character development apart from protecting the completed characters.” But that would be true only if the early and the late Holmes, and the early and the late Watson, were indistinguishable—and in that case there would be no incremental originality to justify copyright protection of the “rounded” characters (more precisely the features that makes them “rounder,” as distinct from the features they share with their earlier embodiments) in the later works.
. . .
The more vague, the less “complete,” a character, the less likely it is to qualify for copyright protection. An author “could not copyright a character described merely as an un-expectedly knowledgeable old wino,” but could copyright “a character that has a specific name and a specific appear-ance. Cogliostro’s age, obviously phony title (‘Count’), what he knows and says, his name, and his faintly Mosaic facial features combine to create a distinctive character. No more is required for a character copyright.” Gaiman v. McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644, 660 (7th Cir. 2004); see also Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119, 121 (2d Cir. 1930) (L. Hand, J.). From the outset of the series of Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels that began in 1887 Holmes and Watson were distinctive characters and therefore copyrightable. They were “incomplete” only in the sense that Doyle might want to (and later did) add additional features to their portrayals. The resulting somewhat altered characters were derivative works, the additional features of which that were added in the ten late stories being protected by the copyrights on those stories. The alterations do not revive the expired copyrights on the original characters.
With the net effect on creativity of extending the copy-right protection of literary characters to the extraordinary lengths urged by the estate so uncertain, and no legal grounds suggested for extending copyright protection beyond the limits fixed by Congress, the estate’s appeal borders on the quixotic. The spectre of perpetual, or at least nearly perpetual, copyright (perpetual copyright would violate the copyright clause of the Constitution, Art. I, § 8, cl. 8, which authorizes copyright protection only for “limited Times”) looms, once one realizes that the Doyle estate is seeking 135 years (1887–2022) of copyright protection for the character of Sherlock Holmes as depicted in the first Sherlock Holmes story.
AFFIRMED
And that’s the way it is. Interesting how the courts have to engage in literary analysis at any level at all to get to this point, though, isn’t it? (“From the outset of the series of Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels that began in 1887 Holmes and Watson were distinctive characters and therefore copyrightable. They were “incomplete” only in the sense that Doyle might want to (and later did) add additional features to their portrayals.”)
There’s also a nice little section on the case-and-controversy clause of the Constitution as applied to declaratory judgments, but the IP fun is in the above extended excerpt. You have to love Judge Posner’s plain-speakin’ judicial style. (“Repeatedly at the oral argument the estate’s lawyer dramatized the concept of a ’round’ character by describing large circles with his arms.” Ouch!)
Just not every day. So how many times, exactly, do you want your client to read that there are “no legal grounds” for the outcome he seeks? Makes you feel like you missed something, uh, elementary, you know?
