Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective & corresponding intellectual property created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle and managed by the Conan Doyle estate. On January 1, 2023, the estate's final copyright on a Holmes story will expire, opening these works up to legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

To celebrate this victory of the public domain, this game jam encourages participants to do all of the above and more with the aim of expanding the variety of Sherlock Holmes content to the furthest reaches of human expression. Create a dance routine depicting Watson's birth. Write a screenplay in which Holmes strongly advocates for the burning of live children as fuel. The market is free as can be, and the possibilities are literally endless.

Please note that I am not an educated person and can take no legal responsibility for what you create - my impression of copyright law is that it is now permissible to use Conan Doyle's original characters, scenarios, phrases, etc. for whatever purpose, but that later works (like the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock films) remain under legal protection, & derivatives will need to constitute fair use or a sufficiently transformative version of the subject matter. If your concept is legally questionable and likely to receive wide attention, read up on the relevant laws or you might get sued by a bunch of overpaid European lawyers.