Trying to determine if an old text is still under copyright is often more difficult than you’d think — in the U.S., that is. In most other countries it’s simpler — in Germany, for instance, if an author has been dead 70 years or more, the work is in public domain. That’s it. There are no other factors to consider. In the U.S., however, there are numerous things to consider in figuring out whether or not a work is in the public domain. See, every few years copy seems to get extended — usually, as has been observed, whenever Mickey Mouse is about to go out of copyright. Whatever the reason, the extension doesn’t apply to books that were copyrighted before the extension, meaning each extension creates a new set of books that are protected by copyright for a different length of time than previous sets of books. Sometimes, the old copyrights can be renewed — but sometimes they can’t. In short, it’s baffling, although there’s general agreement — encouraged by the copyright office — that anything published before 1924 is now in the public domain.

Unless it isn’t: On Monday, a long article in the New York Times by Dave Itzkoff detailed the amazing news that, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories — the overwhelming majority of which were written between 1887 – 1917 — are public domain in the U.K., Sherlock Holmes “remains under copyright protection in the United States through 2023, and that any new properties involving the detective ‘definitely should’ be licensed by the Conan Doyle estate.”

The source for this? Someone named Jon Lellenberg.

But as a report on TechDirt notes, “Lellenberg would say that, because Lellenberg is the literary agent for the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, and wants you to believe that.” But according to TechDirt “it’s not true. All of the Sherlock Holmes books except one have now entered the public domain … a rather important fact — and totally ignored by the NY Times article.”