When I say “extremely close” I mean it. From the Wiki link I provided:
Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, and can astound his companions by telling them minute details about people he has only just met, details that he proves to have deduced in seconds of observation. Where Holmes’s stories are narrated by his companion Dr. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; in the Pons stories, he and Parker share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, where their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Whereas Sherlock Holmes has an elder brother Mycroft Holmes of even greater gifts, Solar Pons has a brother Bancroft to fill the same role. Like Holmes, Pons is physically slender and smokes a pipe filled with “abominable shag”.[1]
You are identifying the historical phenomenon whereby the courts and protectionist rightsholders have developed a jurisprudence over the years that has squeezed out fair uses that (though never lititgated) were routine in the years gone by. This is, in fact, part of the argument for explicitly exempting satire (and not just parody) as part of the limitations and exceptions to copyright: that historically these passed by without legal threat and without any visible impact on the market and thus they can be made black-letter law without any expected negative effect on the market in the future.
The sets were gorgeous, and so was Frank Langella!
I waited night after night for the Mystery poster to come up on the WGBH (Boston PBS) auction one year to no avail.
In terms of not getting sued in the first place it often does.
I’m not disputing your points about the legal issues, just discussing why even litigious rightsholders sometimes choose not to sue. And if it does come to that, yes, acknowledgement or lack thereof would play a role (perhaps a determining one) in the court’s assessing factors 1 and 2.
