In the United States, two of the short stories from The Case-Book, "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" and "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place", were the last two Sherlock Holmes works by Doyle still protected by copyright. They entered the public domain on 1 January 2023, the year after the 95th anniversary of the stories' publication. The copyrights expired on 1 January 1981 in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.[11][12] In the United Kingdom, its copyright was later revived in 1995, expiring again in 1 January 2001.[13]
The Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. claimed they held the American copyrights. The company had a web page setting out its views about other claimants to those rights.[14]
In 2013, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois handed down a ruling about copyright protection, not for the stories themselves, but for the characters of Holmes and Watson. The defendant in the case was Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. The plaintiff was well-known Sherlockian editor, and Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Leslie S. Klinger. In the case of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.,[15] the court ruled that the Holmes and Watson characters as described in the "story elements" that stem from most of the stories—those published before 1924—are in the public domain.[14]
