Tag: copyright

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Make Yourself at Holmes

I don’t like to make assumptions about the New Year. But this time, dealing with it may be … elementary.

For those of you who missed it, Sherlock Holmes has escaped copyright, an opponent more tenacious than Professor Moriarty. As of 2023, the Great Detective is fully in the public domain, allowing the free use of the stories and characters in any medium. Why, we could see novels, movies, TV shows …

Hmm. OK, then.

If this sounds a little confusing, I don’t blame you. After all, Sherlock Holmes is already one of the best-known and most heavily utilized fictional characters in history. New stories appear every year, maybe every month. You can find him in board games. You can find him on stage. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find him in breakfast cereal. Could he be any more public?

As it happens, even Inspector Lestrade could predict the answer: lawyers. Holmes, as it turns out, has long lived in a legal gray area. The bulk of his stories by Arthur Conan Doyle did indeed come into the public domain ages ago. But with a small number of the tales still under copyright, Doyle’s estate could and did battle (most recently with Netflix)  over “unauthorized” use of the character. So he was public, but … not that public?

I could get even further into the silliness of protecting an author’s rights for nearly a century after his death. (Doyle passed away in 1930.) But no one wants to start the new year with a thesis on intellectual property law.  Well, except maybe Sherlock’s smarter brother Mycroft, but he hasn’t been returning my texts lately.

Instead, in honor of this year’s literary liberation, I’d like to suggest a few Sherlock-style resolutions for 2023:

  • Pay Attention: Everyone knows the scene where Holmes meets a client and rattles off the person’s complete biography, based on details he’s noticed. Most of us aren’t going to be THAT observant, but we can make sure to focus on the people around us and better understand where they’re at and what they’re going through.
  • Reason, Don’t Assume: Holmes’ most famous proverb is that “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But sifting one from the other takes thought. If a claim seems wild, check it out. If a claim seems to support what you already believe, check it out even harder – after all, how often do the police in a Holmes story jump to the easy conclusion?
  • Find the Right Experts: Holmes talks to people. Constantly. He talks to medical examiners about the state of a corpse, carriage drivers about a suspect’s movements, even informers about the criminal underworld. But he doesn’t ask a street urchin about the Queen. Find the people and sources who can help you learn, and be careful in judging sources.
  • Use Your Down Time: There will be time “between cases,” so find a way to restore yourself. That said, Holmes isn’t always the best model for how to spend that time. When he goes to a concert or peruses the news, that’s great. When he uses his drawing-room wall for target practice … not so much.
  • Keep a Close Friend: Every Holmes needs his Watson, after all.

With that, best wishes for the year ahead. We’ve all been through some strange adventures lately, and there’s surely more mystery to come. But keep working on the puzzle. And whatever success you find, I hope you lock it in.

Or even Sherlock it in.

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Sing it Out

Singing waiters, rejoice. Your time of birthday deliverance is at hand.

If you’ve ever been out to eat, you know that there are three certainties in modern casual dining: that a tip is 20 percent, that the TV with the game you’re interested in isn’t visible from your table, and that if it’s your birthday, you will be humiliated by a team of waiters singing anything but “Happy Birthday.” You may hear the William Tell Overture. (“Merry day of birth to you, have some cake and candles too!”) You may get painfully rewritten lyrics set to “Stand by Me” or “Kill the Wabbit” … uh, I mean “Flight of the Valkyries.” But you will not get the classic off-key grade-school anthem that has shattered eardrums since time immemorial.

Until now.

A federal court recently ruled that “Happy Birthday’s” copyright is dead. More than dead. According to the judge, the song should have been out of copyright 80 years ago, making its rights the musical equivalent of a George Romero zombie movie. (“Caaaaaaaaaake.”)

Silly argument? Not for the owner and not for anyone wanting to belt out the birthday ballad in public. In fact, “Happy Birthday” has been big business, generating about $2 million a year in royalties from movie producers, restaurants and anyone else who wanted the song and didn’t want a visit from the Warner-Chappell attorneys.

I’ll write that again. Two million dollars a year. For a song that pre-dates World War I.

OK, that does seem silly.

Mind you, this isn’t a diatribe against having copyright at all, or patents, or trademarks, or all the other wonderful things that encourage ideas and ensure a creator gets something of what’s coming to them. (Mark Twain famously said that a country without patent laws was like a crab, only able to travel sideways or backwards.) But it is possible to stay at the party too long. And when “fair compensation” starts to turn into “I’m holding you up because I can,” that’s when people start to object.

We saw a more serious version of this recently in the medical world. The media – both mass and social – exploded after the new owner of a common AIDS drug, Daraprim, announced that its price would go up from $13.50 to $750 a dose. By most estimates, the drug costs about $1 a dose to make.

The word “outrage” doesn’t really go far enough. Twitter went nuclear. Everyone from patients to politicians added their denunciations. And within a day or two of the online fire and brimstone, a white flag went up – Daraprim’s price would go down again. (By how much has not yet been said as I write this.)

Call it supply and demand in vivid action. An owner can charge what he likes for a product. But if no one wants to pay it – if people are actively offended by paying it – it’s time to find another price or another product.

At the bottom of all this is a much-derided word: fair. “Life’s not fair,” we’re told over and over again. But one of our more admirable qualities as a species is a rock-bottom belief that it should be. Granted, sometimes we go too far – anything can go too far – but for the most part, it’s a guide to common decency, empathy, and all the qualities encapsulated in “liberty and justice for all.”
Fairness means we look out for each other, because one day it might be ourselves. It means we think about what we do and why. It means we don’t take unjust advantage of a situation.

We’re not perfect about it. We’re not going to be. But the fact that we still care about trying says something good about us.

Maybe it’s like anything else – if we keep trying, it gets easier. It might even become a piece of cake.

And when it does, we’re all set to sing.