It is hard to believe but the Sherlock Holmes stories are almost a century old. Well, some are more and some less but the point is the stories are very old. So the stories have been in the public domain for years. Yet the character was still under copyright. And although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died well before most us us were born, his heirs still collected a fee when Sherlock Holmes was used as a character in another work.

A blog post on the Smithsonian website explains the court case and ruling that put Sherlock Holmes in the public domain. Sounds like a win for fiction fans.