“Very Well. And I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket”

— Sherlock Holmes, The Red-Headed League

The height of adventure and excitement in the 1900’s, this is so cute! ‘would you please take your gun, my friend? we might have a little danger in our way’. So different from the muscle-bulging, always-scowling, badass macho heroes of our days. Although I guess that this extremely gentlemanly behavior is what was imagined of a macho-hero of that time and place. Still, I love this quote.

As you might have guessed, I’m now reading Sherlock Holmes stories. I got the entire collection from Project Gutenberg, a wonderful website where they archive and organize classical literary works that have fallen into the public domain.

Talking about public domain, it is a good time to remind everyone of the list of works that could have been in the public domain this year. Take a careful look at this list — it is the list of works that would be now in the public domain, under the old 24+24 year rules. Notice that many of these works (specially music and Disney cartoons!) used a lot of inspiration from works that were in the Public Domain in THEIR time! In other words, authors that at the time used the Public Domain, are now NOT giving back, by supporting the crazy copyright system we have in place today.

If you are interested in this subject, this book is a great way to get introduced to the matter of intellectual property, what is wrong with it, what is write with it, and what we should do to fix it.

Happy new year everybody!