Small-town Star Trek museum teaches American cultural history, limits of fan fair use in copyright law

I have the con at the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour, Ticonderoga, N.Y., Oct. 2025
(all photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The sleepy town of Ticonderoga, nestled between Lake Champlain and Lake George in upstate New York just south of the Adirondacks, is the unexpected home of a treasure of American history. 

I don't mean the historic Fort Ticonderoga of the American revolutionary era. 

The Star Trek Original Series Set Tour offers visitors an incomparable experience in television history and a lesson in intellectual property law along the way.

Though the transporter was conceived to save money on
prop shots of shuttle landings, it still cost (1966) $600
per effect per person. That's one reason why red shirts
didn't beam down unless they had, let's say, business on
the planet. Regular-cast shots could be recycled. The
platform circles were made with glass from old spotlights.
It's wild to see close up how clever prop crew were with
what they had on hand.

Star Trek in a Small Town 

I've written many times about the relevance of Star Trek to American law and public policy from the civil rights era to today. The Set Tour is the passion project of Star Trek superfan and Ticonderoga native James Cawley, an Elvis impersonator by trade. Cawley is someone who deeply appreciates Trek's cultural importance and has played a role in ensuring that the franchise survives and lives up to its legacy.

Inside the inconspicuous shell of a former Family Dollar in downtown Ticonderoga, Cawley has recreated the Desilu Studios set of the original Star Trek series of the 1960s in astonishing detail, down to the illuminated, colorful "gumdrop" buttons of starship Enterprise control panels.

Little survived from the original 1960s set. At that time, creators still thought about television productions as one-off broadcasts. Syndication was known, but shows were not yet designed for it. Moreover, few critics would have picked Star Trek, a curious experiment in sending Wagon Train to space, as a show that would stand the test of time. 

In fact, Star Trek's perceived ephemerality became a challenge in reconstructing the set, a Set Tour guide explained. The original series had no script supervisor in charge of continuity, mostly because no one expected viewers would see a Star Trek episode for a second time to notice details. A prop that was a scary alien computer in one episode was gently repurposed to be an Enterprise control system in another. Budgets were thin, too, so prop supervisors were ingenious recyclers.

Cawley long collected the few artifacts and set fragments that remained. In the early 1990s, he worked his way into an assistantship with legendary costume designer William Ware Theiss, then working on Star Trek's reincarnation in The Next Generation. Theiss had, and gave to Cawley, discarded blueprints of the 1960s set, as well as original series uniform patterns. Cawley found his calling and embarked on recreation of the set with excruciating attention to detail.

Sickbay: My guide was terrific, knowledgeable and full of lore.
Here the medical scanner is CGI, but in the 1960s, a grip was
needed just to move the little white indicators up and down
from behind the wall.

A Golden Age of Fan Fiction 

Homage to the past, though, was not Cawley's sole design. In the early 20-aughts, he became the founding producer and "Captain Kirk" star of a Star Trek fan production, New Voyages, later known as Star Trek: Phase II. The highly regarded fan franchise published online 10 episodes from 2004 to 2016, and many original series talents contributed to the show, such as writer David Gerrold and actors George Takei (Hikaru Sulu), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), and Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand).

That's where things get interesting from the intellectual property perspective.

Star Trek brand owners Paramount, CBS, and Viacom—their corporate relationships shifted over the years—had mixed feelings about Star Trek fan productions. There were many, though none besides New Voyages had fixed sets.

When Star Trek's popularity waned, fan fiction kept the franchise alive in public imagination. As long as fan projects were not for profit, the corporations were content to look the other way, even striking an agreement at one time with New Voyages. But when Paramount, et al., were on the verge of a new Star Trek TV or film project, they tightened the reins.

The corporate equivocation, in tandem with a committed and creative fan base, allowed Star Trek fan fiction to thrive in a way that is uncommon in the American entertainment space. Nevertheless, corporate indulgence started to wane after J.J. Abrams took the helm of the 2009 film Star Trek and revitalized the franchise. 

 The recreation of Engineering is two stories high, as was the
original after it was augmented for Original Series season 2.
The warp core is about 12 feet deep but looks deeper
because of a forced-perspective design to fool the camera.

Copyright Showdown

Things came to a head in 2015. Alec Peters, an actor in Phase II, raised money and excitement around a new fan-film project, Star Trek: Axanar, teased by a compelling 2014 short, Prelude to Axanar (IMDb). With advances in technology, the production quality of fan films was by then quite good. Paramount meanwhile was closing in on 2016 release of a new feature film in the reboot universe, Star Trek Beyond, and a new TV series, Star Trek: Discovery, was slated for launch in 2017. In the last days of 2015, Paramount sued Peters and the Axanar project for copyright infringement.

The copyright case, and to a lesser extent the trademark case, on fan fiction is really open and shut. Profitable or not, the take-offs are not permissible without license by the rights-holder. There is a fuzzy line at the outer boundary of copyright, where protection of creative product gives way to "the scènes à faire doctrine." But it's not that fuzzy.

Law school learning on copyright impresses on students that eligible works must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." That does not mean, however, that only that which is committed to print or film is what is copyrighted.

Fictional facts and storylines also may come within copyright protection. Thus, the estate of Anne Rice can claim copyright over the story of a young vampire who shacks up with the master who turned him, adopts a vampire child, and later gives a tell-all interview. But the scènes à faire doctrine ensures that copyright does not remove mere tropes from the public domain. The Rice estate cannot claim copyright infringement in all stories about blood-sucking, undead creatures who cannot tolerate sunlight.

To put that in Star Trek terms, anyone is free to write a story about a human-led inter-species alliance of space-faring civilizations that explores the galaxy and maintains uneasy relations with warlike enemies. But the closer the author gets to a San Francisco-headquartered federation of planets with warp-drive starships, transporters, phasers, and emotion-averse characters with pointy ears, the more the risk of copyright infringement. The line is fuzzy, but it's not wide.

The problem for fan fiction always is that the stories fans want to tell are the stories that explore the boundaries of the established narrative, the existing fictional universe, and ideally, of the recognizable characters in it. That's exactly what copyright does not allow. 

Many scholars have argued for more expansive interpretation of fair use to allow for fan creativity in the presence of clear disclaimer. There's a whole book about the problem of fan fiction in historical and multi-national perspective by California Western Law Professor Aaron Schwabach. The last chapter of Schwabach's book is titled tellingly, "Fanfic: The New Voyages."

Archivist and professor emeritus in cinema studies at NYU, formerly at UCLA, Howard Besser made the case as to Star Trek in particular, besides other popular properties, such as Harry Potter, that the public commons should be larger. He called out corporate owners such as Viacom and Paramount for overreach with unjustifiably aggressive cease-and-desist letters.

But the fact and law remain, protection of fan work that plainly takes place in the same universe as copyrighted works, even when disclaiming ownership and avoiding recognizable names of fictional places and characters, and omitting trademarked titles, still is a non-starter. The analysis is of the totality. Nena may invoke Captain Kirk passingly in "99 Luftballons," but a fan film in the Star Trek universe treads too far.

The Treaty of Axanar 

It was no surprise, then, that the federal court in Paramount Pictures Corp. and CBS Studios, Inc. v. Axanar Productions, Inc. and Alec Peters refused the defendants' motion to dismiss in May 2016. The case over Axanar was careening toward a jury trial, the parties arguing heatedly over evidence and jury instructions, when suddenly, in the third week of January 2017, Paramount and Peters settled.

Out of the Axanar settlement came a remarkable new document, which articulated and still states the boundaries around what Paramount and CBS will tolerate in Star Trek fan fiction. The guidelines stated severe new limits, including:

• The duration of a fan production is limited to 15 minutes, or one story in two parts for 30 minutes, "with no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes."
• The work may not have "Star Trek" in the main title and must be subtitled, "A STAR TREK FAN PRODUCTION."
• No Star Trek content content may be used, and Star Trek-recognizable costumes and props must be official Star Trek merchandise.
• No creator or actor ever employed in a licensed Star Trek production may work on the project, and no one working on the project may be paid.
• A production must be non-commercial with a budget from fundraising limited to $50,000.

Described by fan fiction enthusiasts as "draconian," the new guidelines made impossible the production of projects fans had come to love. It seemed that no film such as Axanar could proceed. Serial projects such as Phase II had to call it quits. The golden age of streaming Star Trek fan fiction was over.

Prelude to Axanar
movie poster
(presumed ©; illustrative use)

Axanar Fal-Tor-Pan?

Yet, for better or worse, the Paramount-CBS guidelines were far from the last word on Axanar. Secret arbitration over money raised for Axanar followed the 2017 settlement. In 2023, Paramount sued Peters in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, alleging that he never stopped raising money for an Axanar film, and asking the court to affirm the outcome of the arbitration. 

Peters did not appear, and the court entered Paramount's desired order in February 2024. Rights-holder copyright consultant Jonathan Bailey, founder of CopyByte, wrote about the case for his Plagiarism Today. Fans follow developments around Peters and Axanar in the public Facebook group page, AxaMonitor.

Meanwhile, production on Axanar most definitely continued. Six days after Paramount had its way in court in Los Angeles, Axanar wrapped filming on its set, Jonathan Lane reported on his Fan Film Factor. Peters himself gives monthly updates on Axanar on YouTube. 

In the October 2025 Axanar update, posted on October 17, Peters reported on post-production progress on the latest installment of Axanar, to follow Prelude. He referenced the lawsuit, thereby suggesting that subsequent "episodes" (not "films") might comply with the Paramount-CBS guidelines. If that's what he meant, then a single episode Axanar cannot exceed 15 minutes, shorter than Prelude's 21 minutes, and there can be only two. Yet Peters described Prelude as mere "proof of concept." Confirming Paramount's 2015 fears, Peters said that Prelude was designed to demonstrate that a fan work could be of such high quality as to be technically indistinguishable from an official studio product.

The ultimate extent of Peters's fealty to the guidelines is unclear. I wonder whether he regards them indeed as mere "guidelines"—like the 1976 copyright fair use guidelines that, in my opinion, courts have too often misapplied as hard lines. In the October update, Peters talked about beta testing a new fundraising website. I wonder further whether he's exceeded the cap of the guidelines. He encouraged fan financial support at the Axanar website.

There was really only one corridor for every corridor shot.
Signs and wall fixtures could be changed, and it curved
(behind camera here) for an illusion of more space.

A New New Voyage

The Axanar debacle in 2016 left Cawley in an awkward spot. His one-of-a-kind set reconstruction had little remaining practical use for filming after Phase II folded. Yet adoring fans would bask in the extravagance of the work. He conceived of the Set Tour. Still, without official imprimatur, he would risk legal jeopardy by opening to the public. 

Cawley invited Paramount execs to Ticonderoga to have a look. No doubt, they were skeptical going in. But, at least as a Set Tour guide told the story, the execs were so impressed with Cawley's loving attention to detail that they agreed to license the Star Trek name. Thus, the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour is not, as I had first suspected, a trademark infringement flying under the radar in tiny Ticonderoga. Set Tour tour guides will not volunteer information about Phase II or other fan productions. Whether they're just playing it safe, or that was an agreement with Paramount, I do not know. But guides will answer questions about Phase II if asked.

The Star Trek Set Tour has a deceptively modest exterior.

To Cawley's credit, he always played ball with Star Trek owners. Remember, it was New Voyages that reached an express understanding with Paramount, before Axanar came along. Cawley came by the 1960s set plans honestly, by all accounts, while working for Theiss on the official franchise. And the Captain Kirk of eight New Voyages episodes even scored a cameo as a bridge officer in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek. The Set Tour has hosted original series cast members as guest tour guides. The original Captain Kirk, ninety-four-year-old William Shatner, is expected back in November 2025.

There is, by the way, a USS Ticonderoga in Star Trek, though accounts differ over whether the name is a nod to Cawley, American history, a real-life Ticonderoga, or all of the above. Five U.S. Navy ships have borne the name Ticonderoga, including an aircraft carrier that distinguished itself in World War II and the Vietnam War. In the 1970 epic war film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Essex-class Ticonderoga served as a set for the slightly smaller Yorktown-class aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6, not the later, nuclear-powered Enterprise carrier built in 1961). A great many other Navy carriers lent their names to Star Trek starships, including the Lexington, Saratoga, and Yorktown in The Original Series.

I had a (phaser) blast of a good time at the Star Trek Original Set Tour earlier this month. On my way home from the American Society of Comparative Law annual conference in Montreal, walking through a wonderland of Gene Roddenberry optimism about humanity's future was a welcome antidote to Professor James Q. Whitman's gloomy prognosis for rule of law in the United States.

Set Tour visitors get a turn in the captain's chair amid Cawley's breathtaking recreation of the classic bridge of the starship Enterprise. Ironically in revolutionary-historical Ticonderoga, amid relics from an imaginary future, I've never felt more a part of American history.

(All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

The Set Tour has tons of artifacts, including ship models, props, and uniforms. Some of the props are recreations, but made so well that they were used in throwback, time-travel episodes, such as Deep Space Nine's 30th anniversary "Trials and Tribble-ations"—besides fan shows such as Phase II.

Litigator loses case, writes musical comedy about it

Shangri-La-La poster at Arlington Drafthouse

When a lawyer loses a case, the lawyer moves on. The experience might be quickly forgotten as run of the mill, or memorably instructive. Either way, it's in the past.

Mike Meier lost a case and did something entirely different. He left practice and wrote a musical comedy about it.

Virginia attorney Meier represented the plaintiffs in Preiss v. Horn (9th Cir. 2013), filed in Nevada. Preiss, who served as physical therapist to Roy Horn, of the famous performing duo Siegfried & Roy, alleged that his services were terminated when he rebuffed Horn's sexual advances. He sued under civil rights law. Preiss's wife was a co-plaintiff, alleging infliction of emotional distress "after watching a videotape of events involving her husband after those events occurred."

The litigation failed. Preiss's claim got hung up on the question of whether he was actually employed by Horn, in the legal sense. The relationship was unclear and proved insufficient to support a civil rights claim.

Preiss's wife complained of negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED). NIED usually is not actionable in American jurisdictions, as I've explained before at The Savory Tort. Insofar as there are exceptions, the plaintiff watching a video well after the fact did not evidence the contemporaneous observation required by exceptions for liability to bystanders.

The outcome is not surprising, and one need not think it dispositive of what happened between Preiss and Horn. Tort cases without physical injury—such as civil rights claims, defamation and privacy, and infliction of emotional distress—always are a heavy lift for plaintiffs, because they bear the burden of mustering evidence usually in the possession of the defense. Failure to prove does not establish the truth or falsity of the allegations.

Against the odds, Meier fought hard for his clients, and maybe too hard. According to a disciplinary disposition in New York (Sup. Ct. App. Div. 2018), the federal trial judge in Nevada found plaintiffs' claims in opposition to dismissal "not simply without merit but blatantly and undeniably so," insistence on the NIED claim "'absurd' and 'frivolous,'" and prosecution of Preiss's claim "needlessly, unreasonably, and vexatiously multipl[ying] the proceedings in bad faith."

The federal court ordered Meier to pay a sanction entered against the plaintiffs. His home bar of Virginia suspended him from practice for 30 days, and the New York court entered a censure.

The whole affair might have been a welcome excuse for Meier to pursue his passions quite outside the courtroom, in writing, stage, and music. His website Mike Meier Writes now boasts eight screenplays and three books, besides the present project. 

The description of the screenplay Where the Aliens Are exemplifies the sort of quirky narrative Meier favors: "In this science fiction comedy, an elderly professor, along with his neighbors, a lesbian couple and their son, set out to save the world from an impending alien invasion."

Arlington Drafthouse
marquee, July 2025
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In July at the Arlington Drafthouse in northern Virginia, I was treated to one in just a three-performance run of Meier's comedy musical, Shangri-La-La, a.k.a. All That Glitters (trailer at YouTube). The show is a thinly disguised retelling of the facts alleged in Preiss v. Horn. Meier's website summarizes:

It is a comedy about Las Vegas show business and human nature, with a sprinkling of drama and #Metoo. Joshua from Germany fulfills his lifelong dream of moving to Las Vegas. He is thrilled to get a job as the assistant to the retired Siegfried & Roy, only to find out the hard way that not all that glitters is gold. Joshua’s quest for justice culminates in a court case. But Joshua does not know about the Las Vegas tradition of "Hometown Justice." After all, that Las Vegas tradition began with Bugsy Siegel, the New York criminal who built the first casino on the Las Vegas strip, The Flamingo.

Aptly, Meier himself played Joshua's lawyer. The show pulls no punches in telling Meier's side of the story, both as to the plaintiffs' facts and his own plight as their counselor. In Meier's telling of it, he was victimized by Las Vegas insiders, a legal system under Horn's influence, and punished for daring to challenge a monied icon and power player. 

Who knows. Vegas is no stranger to corrupt influences, and stranger things have happened there.

Of course, owing to Meier's penchant for the absurd and the fictionalization of the case, the stage telling is over the top and does not purport to be factual, wink-wink. It's an amusing romp at the expense of Siegfried and Roy, who are played as buffoons, if dangerous ones. Their comical, Hans-and-Franz-reminiscent accents put on plenty of comedy mileage. Meier himself grew up in Germany, and his speech bears just a trace of authentic accent, in contrast.

Siegfried and Roy are both dead now, since 2021. Even insofar as their estates have lingering legal interests in trademark or right of publicity, All That Glitters is plainly a parody from an outsider's perspective.

The play has a dense script and an original score. Both vacillate between clever and banal. Some droll dialog earns laughs, to be sure. There is also ample jejune chatter that sorely needs rewrite by an experienced comedic editor. The songs are catchy in places, and elsewhere blister with lackluster lyrics. The cast did a superb job with what they had to work with.

To be fair, such a mixed record is to be expected in a straight-to-stage vanity project. Meier deserves credit for his determination. Polished stagecraft is not really the point. 

Meier manages to put his creative stamp on a compelling story and somehow turns sexual harassment into legit comedy. At the same time, with Siegfried and Roy gone, Meier gets the last word in his case. And he clearly has a wicked good time doing it.

You can listen to five tunes from Shangri-La-La at Mike Meier Writes. I'm weirdly looking forward to Meier's forthcoming mockumentary, "So You Think You Can Trust the Media?"

It happens, incidentally, that a couple of weeks after I saw Shangri-La-La in Arlington, I visited the Flamingo in Las Vegas. I had a fabulous time at the Flamingo-resident show Piff the Magic Dragon, starring Piff, the lovely Jade Simone, and the world's only magic-performing chihuahua, Mr. Piffles, an act of America's Got Talent and Queer Eye fame. I got to scratch Mr. Piffles under the muzzle after the show. The trio is on tour now with All-Star Vegas, appearing in Cranston, Rhode Island, tomorrow, September 18.

'Fisk' is the civil-practice lawyer you've been looking for

If you're looking to fill that Netflix queue as the writers' strike drags on, check out the Australian sitcom, Fisk.

When I put together a church message on ethics recently, I was looking to fill out a line about civil practice attorneys and coming up short. I wanted to make the point that when someone says "personal injury lawyer," we are quick to think of iconic unethical characters, and it's harder to conjure up the ethical ones. I didn't at first realize how much harder.

I ran the thought experiment on myself first. Even for me, a torts prof, it's hard, first, to filter out criminal lawyers. When I work the problem chronologically, the first character lawyer I remember adoring in my youth is Star Trek's Samuel T. Cogley (Elisha Cook), who defended Captain Kirk in a court-martial: criminal. The first civil selection that comes to mind is Boston Legal's Alan Shore (James Spader). But even he first appeared on The Practice, a criminal-law show.

Solidly on the civil side, unethical characters do come to mind quickly. For the message, I settled on My Cousin Vinny's Vinny Gambini (Joe Pesci), who was a civil-practice attorney out of his depth in a criminal-law storyline, and, to cross generations, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul's Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). 

Then the ethical characters....  There are plenty in criminal, both prosecution and defense. Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) is most often cited as admired when I survey 1L students. Ben Matlock (Andy Griffith) and Atticus Finch are classics.

Civil? Alas, so few people remember Alan Shore. I briefly considered Victor Sifuentes (Jimmy Smits). But on close inspection, nobody on L.A. Law holds up well as memorable and consistently ethically. There was Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart), but she had a lot of balls (and dancing babies) in the air besides law practice. I interrogated the staff of The West Wing; none of the leads was a lawyer. I'm fond of Madam Secretary's Mike B. (Kevin Rahm), but he was as often as not a devil's advocate to test Elizabeth McCord's righteousness. Erin Brockvich? Real-life hero, but, to be technical, paralegal and consultant, not lawyer. Maybe Ralph Nader, though then it gets political.

John Calvin (1509-1564)
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

For the church message, I settled on the real-life John Calvin, the 16th-century French theologian. He trained as a lawyer before he got caught up in the Reformation. It's a reach, I know.  But the bench is not deep, and Calvin was a stalwart for his faith.

So I come back around to Fisk, the title character of which is lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk, created and played by comedian Kitty Flanagan. Tudor-Fisk was a high-powered corporate lawyer in Sydney until a bitter divorce and a workplace meltdown prompted her to upend her career and move to Melbourne. There she struggled to find a bed and a job, landing as a temporary fill-in for a suspended trusts-and-estates lawyer at a scrappy two-partner shop.

Fisk is not about law or legal ethics. The show, and its comedy, derive from Flanagan's delightfully dry-witted character as she navigates the ups and downs of her shattered life. The law practice is setting and background. But then—I don't think it's a big spoiler to say—her quiet diligence in her new job suddenly and gratifyingly comes to the fore in the finale of the six-episode season 1.

When I finished Fisk s1 last week, my own biases were laid bare. I had tried to think of what an ethical civil-practice attorney looks like. I pictured a renowned, tough-as-nails civil litigator, a silver-haired Matlock analog, dazzling jurors in the courtroom in "ripped from the headlines" cases.

Forget all that. Helen is the real deal.

I fell for Fisk.

Season 1 of Fisk is streaming now on Netflix. Season 2 ran on Australian Broadcasting last year; to my knowledge, it has not yet been licensed to stream in America.

UPDATE Oct. 22, 2023: Fisk s2 is now available to purchase in America from services including Amazon Prime.

Netflix's 'Enola Holmes' tangles with family copyright

Brown (image by Gage Skidmore 2017 CC BY-SA 2.0)

I quite enjoyed the film Enola Holmes, released on Netflix in 2020, a welcome respite from #QuarantineLife.  Stranger Things sensation Millie Bobby Brown was delightful as the lesser known teen sister of the super-sleuth Sherlock, played with rich arrogance by Henry Cavill.  I did not know then that the movie was based on a YA book series, by fantasy writer Nancy Springer, dating to 2006. 

The Arthur Conan Doyle estate seemed content to let Springer go about the quiet business of spin-off fan fiction, but got its hackles up when Netflix got into the game.  The copyright picture behind Sherlock Holmes is complicated: one might say, a puzzle to be solved.  Some of the works have fallen into the public domain and some have not, and the matter is further complicated by a U.S. copyright regime that protects copyright a full generation longer than British law.

The Doyle estate sued Springer and Netflix in federal court in New Mexico in June for copyright and trademark infringement.  The estate's U.S. licensing representative lives in Santa Fe, an attorney explained to the Las Cruces Sun News.  The case, Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. v. Springer (D.N.M.), was dismissed in December upon stipulation, suggesting the parties reached a settlement.

Claims of copyright in fictional characters are always dicey, because they press the limits of the doctrinal dichotomy in copyright law that only fixed representations, and not ideas, may be protected by copyright.  A character has one foot fixed in a tangible medium of expression, as the law requires, and, at the same time, has one foot in the wind of idea.  In the instant case, the plaintiff advanced one remarkable theory to bolster its position.

The plaintiff suggested that Arthur Conan Doyle in fact authored two distinct versions of the Sherlock Holmes character, and that the fictional Holmes universe created by Springer and Netflix employed specifically the latter incarnation—which, suitably for the plaintiff's case, remains copyrighted.  The complaint explained that before WWI, Holmes was famously "aloof and unemotional," quoting Watson from "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" on Holmes's "deficien[cy] in human sympathy," "aversion to women," and "disinclination to form new friendships."  Then:

All of this changed. After the stories that are now in the public domain, and before the Copyrighted Stories, the Great War happened. In World War I Conan Doyle lost his eldest son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley. Four months later he lost his brother, Brigadier-general Innes Doyle. When Conan Doyle came back to Holmes in the Copyrighted Stories between 1923 and 1927, it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind. Holmes needed to be human. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy.

Conan Doyle made the surprising artistic decision to have his most famous character—known around the world as a brain without a heart—develop into a character with a heart. Holmes became warmer. He became capable of friendship. He could express emotion. He began to respect women.

Thus, the complaint posits, Enola Holmes, the story of Sherlock's sister, a figure long marginalized but now primed for redemption, is derivative specifically of post-WWI Sherlock Holmes—©.

Despite the dismissal, you still can enjoy untangling the skein of intellectual property claims in Conan Doyle Estate v. Springer with Alice Chaplin, writing on February 4 for A&L Goodbody's Ireland IP and Technology Law Blog.  Then solve a mystery with Enola Holmes on Netflix.

Book review: Towles's 'Gentleman in Moscow' weaves rich tapestry of 20th-century Soviet Russia

I'm part of a book group, among other reasons, to find an excuse to read things I otherwise would not take the time to read. I love my group, but a lot of the times, the reading only confirms my good judgment about use of time in the first place. The exceptions, though, stand out, e.g., Fredrick Backman's Man Called Ove, and invariably make the whole commitment worthwhile.

Last month was such a worthwhile month.  We read Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow, selection of public-service-lawyer-extraordinaire Karen Owen Talley.  Here's the beautiful and clever book trailer (Delphine Burrus, dir.).



"Beautiful and clever" only begins to describe this book.  I have not read Towles's previous and popular Rules of Civility, so I cannot compare.  Suffice to say, though, I was surprised to learn that Towles is a Boston-born investment manager writing from Manhattan, and not a full-time scholar of the Russian Revolution, or even a recently arrived time traveler from 1920s Moscow.  Shelved as "historical fiction" in some libraries, this book depicts changing Russian society over decades after the revolution, from the 1920s to 1950s, all from the curious and ultimately delightful perspective of an aristocratic political prisoner under house arrest in an upscale hotel.

Maybe Towles was playing at Russian style, or it's just his speed; the book feels slow on plot a good ways in.  Ordinarily that's a turn-off for my action-aficionado, smartphone-addled brain.  Yet somehow this book was engrossing; every day I looked forward to re-immersing my mind's eye in the fantastical world of the Metropol Hotel, as envisioned from the endearingly witty perspective of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov.

Towles is brilliant at authoring irresistible rabbit holes for the reader.  Sometimes these seemingly discrete stories feel like pointless tangents; a fellow groupie and I had simultaneously imagined Towles as the sort of person who carries around a small memo pad to jot down vignettes of the day, from his peculiar perspective, and then litters his writing room with the pages.  Yet these seeming tangents weave themselves together later in the book into a tapestry that is so much more than the sum of their parts.  While each vignette in the book seems dispensable in its time, the whole of the novel would be painfully incomplete were it lessened by any one.  Here's a short example, just as the Count has discovered morning coffee and the reward of grinding it himself:

Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep.  As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain.  But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee.

In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth.  The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things.  While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing.

. . . .

So perfect was the combination that upon finishing, the Count was tempted to crank the crank, quarter the apple, dole out the biscuits, and enjoy his breakfast all over again.

But time and tide wait for no man.

I won't go much into the meat of the tale, other than to counsel the reader to watch for time as a theme.  The seeming absence of plot is itself a grand illusion, representative of how time passes and transforms Russia outside the steady, unchanging walls of our protagonist's hotel confinement.  I didn't realize that until we started to put the pieces together as a book group, and now I wish I had paid closer attention on first read.

A TV series is in the making.  I thought that a bad idea, at first, worried that this delicate marvel would be tortured by Hollywood-like priorities until it yields something more fast and furious.  But a fellow groupie pointed out that it's all in the characters: an unhurried and dignified telling might be executed well in the right hands.  Perhaps it bodes well then that Kenneth Branagh is set to produce and star.  But don't wait for a screen adaptation; you'll be cheating yourself out of a journey best rendered by the imagination.