Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate is suing Miramax over its elderly Sherlock Holmes movie

As explained in this Variety article from last year, the fight to determine whether or not Sherlock Holmes should be in the public domain has been (unsurprisingly) pretty heated. On one side, you have the people who control the estate of Holmes-creator Arthur Conan Doyle. They want to control the character so they can make a ton of money off of the countless Holmes TV shows and movies. On the other side, you have generations of writers inspired by Holmes who want their chance to tell a story within his world—writers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They don’t want anyone to control the character so they can make a ton of money off of their own Holmes projects.
Unfortunately for Doyle’s estate, though, the copyright has already expired on the vast majority of his Holmes stories, meaning it doesn’t have much ground to stand on when it comes to trying to control the Sherlock Holmes brand. However, that hasn’t stopped the estate from pretending that it has ground to stand on, with Sherlock, Elementary, and the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies all licensing the character from Doyle’s estate even though they don’t legally have to.