> The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In 2014, by then a published author in his 40s, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until 2021 to publish it.

WTf? Can't write an original spin off on some nearly hundred year old thing, without brushing with copyright law?

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sharkjacobs 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The Conan Doyle Estate filed a lawsuit against Netflix over [Enola Holmes (2020)], claiming it violated copyright by depicting Sherlock Holmes as having emotions. They argued this aspect of the character did not fall under the public domain as he was only described as having emotions in stories published between 1923 and 1927, and the copyright for the stories published in that period still had not expired under copyright law in the United States.

	▲	KPGv2 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This was a nuisance lawsuit, and Netflix only settled to make it go away. They would've crushed the Estate if it actually went to trial.

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SirSavary 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Crazy huh? If an author wrote something as a child and lived over a hundred, you could hit even two hundred :)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, died in December 1940. Given the rules around copyright I would have expected things to expire in 2010 (death of author, roll to next calendar year, +70 years) so I'm unsure what happened here.

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duskwuff 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The rules were different at the time Gatsby was published. Its copyright expired 95 years after it was published - 1930 + 95 = 2025.

	▲	cyphar 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I was under the impression that the Mickey Mouse Protection Act 1998[1] extended the copyright protection for works retroactively (though already public domain works were excluded). That being said, I guess the act had precautions to stop it from reducing the copyright protection for edge cases like these? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
	▲	kazinator 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		But Nick is not a derivative work; it's something original which references the characters and ideas in The Great Gatsby. It's pretty crazy that you have to wait until 95 years until the publication of the referenced work to publish something like this. Is it even about copyright or more about the abstract threat of litigation using copyright as a (baseless) pretext.
	▲	SirSavary 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Whack, I always naively assumed copyright periods have only ever gotten longer. Good to know The Mouse [1] has precedent behind their legal theory :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...
	▲	incompatible 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It was published in 1925 and expired in 2021.

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incompatible 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The US only switched to the life + 70 system in recent decades, and it doesn't retroactively apply.

I think if you add a child as a coauthor, the copyright will last longer. Nobody seems to do that, probably because it now lasts long enough for just about anybody.