6 - World-Building Logics and Copyright: The Dark Knight and the Great Detective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
Derek Johnson says that the term franchise has become “cultural shorthand for understanding the expansion of cultural production across different media and industry sectors”. From this perspective, it makes sense to speak of a Holmes franchise, since texts featuring the character appear across all media and across all industry sectors. However, this franchise differs from others such as Star Wars or Harry Potter because it lacks a central and coordinating holder of the intellectual property. My contribution will explore the implications of Holmes’ copyright status for the production, circulation, and reception of Holmes texts in the early 21st century. I will argue that the lack of a guiding corporate hand results in extremely divergent representations of the storyworld and character across different media platforms.
Keywords: Narrative, Copyright, Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Fictional Worlds
Estate Of “Sherlock Holmes” Author Loses Case Seeking To Stop Others’ Use Of Character Fan-fictioners, slash-fictioners, pulp-o-philes, rationalists, positivists, Victorians, colonials, imperials, Freudians, Londoners, cokeheads, and crime solvers of the world — rejoice!
(Mora 2014)These Buzzfeed headlines announce that, after protracted legal wrangling, Sherlock Holmes, the 127-year-old fictional detective, had been freed from copyright constraints. From the initiation of plaintiff Leslie Klinger's motion for summary judgement against the Conan Doyle Estate in a United States District Court in February 2013 to the United States Supreme Court's refusal to consider the case in November 2014, leading news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and the BBC, covered the copyright dispute. The character's global ubiquity and popularity motivated this coverage, but so did the dispute's potential implications for the copyright status of other serialized fictional characters. Some saw the plaintiff's success in the case as a broader victory for those maintaining that endlessly extended and rigorously enforced copyright stifles creativity. As Holmes fan fiction-ers and slash fiction-ers rejoiced, so did critics hoping to reform the current US intellectual property regime and fans hoping to free other fictional characters from their legal shackles.
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- World Building Transmedia Fans Industries , pp. 109 - 128Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017
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