See for example, the Star Trek TNG episode that used Sherlock Holmes. At the time, the studio assumed Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, but were contacted by the estate and told they would have to license the character if they wanted to use him again. This almost prevented a follow up episode, and probably did prevent other follow ups to what was considered a good story line.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Elementary,_Dear_Data

I'm assuming one can now make movies/television/video games with those characters without paying any sort of royalty.

[serious] Has the BBC had to pay royalties for making/showing their Sherlock series? In that case, to whom? The person who created these fictional characters died over 70 years ago.

Both TV shows and the movie studio entered into a licensing agreement with the Conan Doyle estate, it's all in the article.

I believe the Copyrights for Sherlock Holmes expired in year 2000 and in public domain since then. So I don't think BBC needed to license it from the estate, at least in the UK.

For making any art containing that character. Seems like a big deal. I thought he already was public domain and that was why there were so many derivative works (movies, tv, video games etc) but I guess they all had to license the character from the Doyle estate (for US works at least).

There is a US TV show called "Elementary" which uses the characters Sherlock Holmes and Watson, set in NYC in the present day.