Posted under Tags
I'm cleaning up some ambiguous tags and thought about cleaning up the Sherlock Holmes tag since he is a popular fictional character that various series parody, sort of like what I've been seeing with Sengoku era figures. The problem is that I didn't see a copyright tag for him and related characters like James Moriarty or John Hamish Watson. What would be a good copyright tag to bring these characters under a tag so that a qualifier can be made for Sherlock Holmes himself?
The most obvious option is sherlock holmes (series). You can quibble about whether 50+ short stories are a 'series', but that's how we tag most franchises that aren't trivial to gather together under a single unambiguous title, like tales of (series) and monogatari (series).
Another option would be the adventures of sherlock holmes, after the first published anthology of Sherlock stories.
In either case there's a high potential for confusion and mistagging, but that seems unavoidable.
You could use either use sherlock_holmes_(character) or sherlock_holmes_(series).
^sniped
7HS said:
Another option would be the adventures of sherlock holmes, after the first published anthology of Sherlock stories.
This is my preference.
I made The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes tag and populated it as best I could.
The trouble is that Sherlock Holmes himself as a character is totally out of copyright.
Some of Conan Doyle's later Sherlock stories, are naturally in copyright since he lived to 1930; but SH is no longer copyrightable; and it would be wrong to suggest in any way that he is ( same goes for his fellows in his genre ).
The Doyle Estate was one of those ferocious ones, snapping at illicit use and grabbing at any profit, not unlike Disney. I doubt if the old rascal would have approved such behaviour, seeing his love of pirates etc..
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Claverhouse said:
The trouble is that Sherlock Holmes himself as a character is totally out of copyright.
Some of Conan Doyle's later Sherlock stories, are naturally in copyright since he lived to 1930; but SH is no longer copyrightable; and it would be wrong to suggest in any way that he is ( same goes for his fellows in his genre ).
The Doyle Estate was one of those ferocious ones, snapping at illicit use and grabbing at any profit, not unlike Disney. I doubt if the old rascal would have approved such behaviour, seeing his love of pirates etc..
The fact that the Sherlock Holmes copyright is now in the public domain doesnt actually mean its not a copyright any more. The epic of Gilgamesh is still "a copyright" and that was written 2000 years ago.
I doubt the author will sue.
But if you read that link --- and remember we are only dealing with the [ somewhat ridiculous, thank you Sonny Bono ] copyright laws of the USA, every other country has their own laws, however conforming to agreed group laws --- he is out of copyright clear and free.
The legal case of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate that settled the claim actually rested on an interesting issue, whether a copyright claim can persist on a character even if the works depicting that character have fallen out of copyright. The defense of the Doyle estate went something like this: sure, Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are now at least 90 years old, but other stories about Sherlock Holmes are still under copyright, therefore Sherlock Holmes is still under copyright.#
link above.
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The ruling, issued by Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, affirmed a district court ruling, last December, that the characters were no longer protected by American copyright, and so could be used without paying any permission fees.
Claverhouse said:
I doubt the author will sue.
The point isn't that it isn't in copyright, the point is how danbooru uses the term "copyright".
It helps to think of Danbooru "copyright" as more of a setting or universe tag, rather than the legal term.
Thanks.
And just for the record to avoid confusion, Gilgamesh was more like 9000 years ago. I remember it well.
