First there was the US drama Elementary, a modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu. Now it appears that the success of the BBC's Sherlock is to spawn a flood of new takes on Arthur Conan Doyle's detective after a US court ruling paved the way to fresh adaptations. The Sunday Times reports that while some of Conan Doyle's stories and plotlines are protected by copyright, the character of Sherlock is not. The US judge ruled that only the last 10 Holmes stories remained under copyright, adding that the remainder had entered the public domain. US studios lining up films include Paramount, which has revived a Sherlock comedy starring Will Ferrell, while Warner has hired Iron Man 3 scriptwriter Drew Pearce to write the third part of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes series starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. International producers will now be able to sell their films in the US market, leading to reports in the Indian press that Slumdog Millionaire star Anil Kapoor is in talks with UK-based director Anand Tucker to play a Punjabi version of Holmes. A film is also planned in China, where the BBC show is already popular, with fans hailing Benedict Cumberbatch as a "male god" and pointing to possible gay subtexts in the show; its launch attracted some 3 million viewers on on video hosting platform Youku. Producer Han Sanping might want to think carefully about the names of the Holmes and Watson characters, though – Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are known locally as "Curly Fu" and "Peanut".