In fact, that was the argument in court of Leslie Klinger, a Holmes scholar and enthusiast who intends to publish a book of original Holmes stories by various authors titled In the Company of Sherlock Holmes in the fall. However, the Doyle Estate argued that copyright protection should extend from the last collection of stories, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927—which would mean that the character could not be used without permission until 2022. According to them, Holmes continued to evolve, becoming more mellow and closer friends with Watson. To write stories just using the earliest Holmes material is a crime against Holmes and art in general, according to Doyle estate attorney William Zieske. Or, as he put it, "to reduce true literary characters to a cardboard cutout, parts of which can be carved off, I think does literature a great disservice."

Zieske's objection is framed in terms of this particular court case; he's arguing that you can't use Doyle's early stories unless you use all of Doyle's stories. But the argument, if taken to its logical conclusion, actually seems to dismiss the value of any and all adaptations of a work. If it "does literature a great disservice" to carve off bits of it, then how does that not apply to, say, the film version of 12 Years a Slave, which is (inevitably) quite selective in its use of its (public domain) source material? If any literary dicing is bad, then it seems like copyright should be extended as much as possible in order to prevent as many adaptations as possible, carefully preserving the original literary vision from depredations.

There's certainly an appeal to this line of thinking. Bad adaptations can be ugly and depressing. I certainly wish that Brian Azzarello had never gotten his clammy oven mitts on Wonder Woman, and that DC Comics hadn't decided to make a mess of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen. If you love a work of art, it's painful to see it get mishandled and proverbially spit on for profit.

But if you love a work of art, it may also inspire you. Such inspiration can take lots of different forms. If you're Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, you might retool Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories to make up your own detective and name him Sherlock Holmes—a process of carving off and rejiggering which you'd think even the Doyle estate would approve of.

Sometimes inspiration can be even more direct, as when creators carve off entire characters from another work and make them their own. This sort of direct lift can make people bristle. Where's the creativity, they ask, in writing up yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Why not be original and make something of your own? (For examples of this line of argument, just scroll down through the comments in this National Post story about the legal battle over Sherlock Holmes.)