Blackletter

Today, we're going to talk about the Netflix lawsuit involving the estate of sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series. The Doyle estate sued Netflix over its making of a film called Enola Holmes. That film is about the 14-year-old fictional sister of Sherlock Holmes. The issue is that most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, at least those published prior to 1923, were found to be out of copyright by another court, so that left the Doyle estate with only Sherlock Holmes stories published between 1923 and 1927, approximately 10 stories, which they claim is when Sherlock Holmes, the character, was developed. The Enola movie, of course, involves a fictional sister Sherlock Holmes that does not appear in any of the Sherlock Holmes books. Copyright law, when it comes to protecting fictional characters, there are two basic tests. There's the character delineation test and the story-being-told test. They sort of come to the same thing, but the character delineation test specifically has been sai