im not sure if the conan doyle estate would raise a stink since there are published works of sherlock holmes gay porn from the 70s – i think the famous one is the sexual adventures of sherlock holmes – where badically all the male characters have sex and mrs hudson is young and sits on sherlocks knee (this is what ive heard)

You can’t just tell us things like that and then not give us any pointers on where to find it!

I do know, however, that the Doyle Estate threatened action against Ritchie when he and Downey Jr. and those guys were implying/joking about Holmes and Watson in the recent movies.  Doyle’s granddaughter claims it is “not in the spirit of the books” for Holmes to be portrayed as a homosexual, and has said that she’ll take action if people try.

But that last went around in 2010, before the remaining US copyrights on Holmes were challenged in court.  It’s questionable whether the Estate has the legal power to do anything now (the case is being appealed, so it’s not a settled issue), and she’s never said or implied anything to my knowledge about whether she’d stoop to a media smear campaign.  So that’s just speculation.

(The stuff from the 70s may be weird, though, because international copyright law has mostly been cleaned up since then.  For example, in the 1960s, Ace Books was the first US publisher to print The Lord of the Rings in the US—because Houghton-Mifflin had not filed a copyright in the US.  And technically, they were right.  The matter was only cleared up through Tolkien marshaling his American fanbase to pressure the company.)

(Also, you know, the porn industry.  They practically invented copyright piracy.  HIstorically, mostly everybody else just did their best to forget they existed, unless something got too embarrassingly famous.)