Adding another legal chapter to a copyright dispute previously lost by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate over the copyright of stories involving Sherlock Holmes, a federal appeals court has ruled the estate must also pay legal costs in the dispute.

In a ruling issued in June, a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. District Court in Chicago held that the publisher of an anthology of modern Sherlock Holmes stories edited by Leslie S. Klinger did not have to pay a license fee because the stories featured characters first published before 1923, and their copyrights had expired.

The court disagreed with the Doyle estate that because stories published by Mr. Doyle between 1923 and his death, and still under copyright, depicted characters in a more rounded form than those found in the pre-1923 fiction, the copyrights are still in force, and the book's publisher did not have to pay the estate a $5,000 license fee it demanded.

In a ruling issued Monday, the same three-judge appellate panel unanimously ruled that Mr. Klinger was entitled to $30,680 of legal fees in the case as well. “The estate opposes Klinger's request on the same hopeless grounds that it had urged in its appeal, but does not question the amount of fees as distinct from Klinger's entitlement to an award of any amount of fees in this case,” says the ruling in Leslie S. Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd.

The 7th Circuit has previously held in another case that “as a consequence of the successful defense of an infringement suit the defendant is entitled to a 'very strong' presumption in favor of receiving attorneys' fees, in order to ensure that an infringement defendant does not abandon a meritorious defense institutions in which 'the cost of vindication exceeds the private benefit to the party,'” said the panel.

“Unless Klinger is awarded his attorney's fees, he will have lost money … in winning an appeal in which the defendant's only defense bordered on the frivolous: A Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one,” said the court,

“It's time the estate in its own self-interest, changed its business model,” said the court in awarding Mr. Klinger the attorneys' fees.