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 said to be when a character has been delineated to the point at which behavior is relatively predictable so that when that character is placed in a new plot situation, it will react in ways that are at once distinctive and unsurprising. Interestingly, the other standard, the story-being-told test was applied to say, basically, if the character is only there to move the story along and doesn't have these distinctive features, that you fail and you don't have copyright rights.
The next thing they have to prove is that is the character and the copied work actually a copy of the character in the original work? In other words, is it infringing? In this case, it's really this movie centered around Millie Bobby Brown character, Enola Holmes, and not so much around Sherlock Holmes, Henry Cavill's character himself. He's certainly an important background character, a supporting character, but by no means the center of attention, and nor do I think personally that a lot of the things that he does in the film are so related to the actual Sherlock Holmes books as to make me believe that it's actual copyright infringement of the Holmes character, at least as distinguished between the very first Sherlock Holmes books in the 1880s and the series of 10 books from 1923 to 1927.
