So, okay. Going waaaaaaay back to the beginning of the thread and the Superman copyright termination case.
The latest is that, about 6 weeks back, the Siegels secured more Superman rights. Here's how it went down: as I noted back at the beginning of the thread, copyright lawyer Jeff Trexler put out a slew of very good posts about the case on Newsarama. One of them,
Russell Keaton: Superman's Fifth Beatle, attracted the attention of publisher Denis Kitchen, who alluded in a
comment to some unpublished correspondence between Siegel and Keaton. The Siegels' lawyers caught wind of this and asked to see the letters, and discovered that Siegel had written the Superman story from Action Comics #4 prior to signing his contract with National/DC.
(To review, Siegel and Shuster's heirs are only eligible to reclaim copyright on material that was created BEFORE their contracts with DC; whatever they made under contract was never their property to begin with and was always DC's. Stuff they created on their own and THEN sold to DC, however, is eligible for their heirs to reclaim.)
The upshot of all of this is that the Siegels now own Superman's origin story.
Newsarama has a quick overview;
Variety has a more in-depth description of what the Siegels got here:
This means the Siegels -- repped by Marc Toberoff of Toberoff & Associates -- now control depictions of Superman's origins from the planet Krypton, his parents Jor-El and Lora, Superman as the infant Kal-El, the launching of the infant Superman into space by his parents as Krypton explodes and his landing on Earth in a fiery crash.
That's a pretty fucking important piece of the property to own, right there.
The timing is good for the Siegels: this week saw the release of DC's latest retelling of Superman's origin story, and recent rumors suggest that, after the disappointing numbers from Superman Returns, DC was planning to give the franchise the Batman treatment and relaunch it from the origin story. (Per
Nrama, WB has confirmed that the litigation has put Superman movie plans on hold.)
That said, the nimrods on the comments threads suggesting that the Siegel heirs deliberately timed this decision for the release of Superman: Secret Origin and to preempt a hypothetical Superman Begins clearly do not have a working idea of how the court system works; you can't really time decisions by a comic book release schedule.
Meanwhile, over on the Marvel side:
Hollywood Reporter: Jack Kirby's heirs have hired Toberoff and filed similar termination notices to Marvel for a bevy of his characters, including the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, and...Spider-Man?
Per
Robot 6, Kirby's claim on Spider-Man goes something like this: Stan Lee approached him with the character idea and he did a couple designs; Stan didn't like him because he was too musclebound, so he went to Ditko instead. But some accounts claim that Kirby introduced some elements from an unpublished character called the Silver Spider that he and Joe Simon co-created.
CBR has a good rundown of the legal ramifications here; Nat Gertler has a list of
bad assumptions people in the comments section have been making.
Some points:
While they're similar on the surface (and share the same lawyer), this is a completely different animal from the Superman case. For starters, the circumstances of Siegel and Shuster's contracts with DC were well-known; the heirs know that DC is entitled to the work they did under contract and DC knows the heirs are entitled to the work they did before the contract, it's just a question of determining which is which, and what that entails. Meanwhile, from what I gather, nobody really knows what Kirby's contract with Marvel was, or even if he had one; apparently everyone who worked for Marvel in the 1960's was a freelancer, not an employee. This was so Marvel could screw them out of employee benefits, but it may come back to bite them in the ass if it means they were buying characters from people who weren't their employees. Marvel's going to have to produce evidence that Kirby created his characters as work-for-hire, under a contract -- and not a back-of-the-check contract. At any rate, when Kirby tried to get his original art back from Marvel in the 1980's, they tried to make him sign a contract saying he wouldn't seek the return of any of his characters, which would suggest they thought he might have a case.
Another key difference is Stan Lee's place in the equation. Where the Siegel and Shuster heirs are BOTH seeking termination of copyright transfer, Stan Lee's not going to seek termination on any of the characters he co-created. He's got a sweetheart deal with Marvel; as I understand it he agreed never to seek copyright termination in return for $1M a year for the rest of his life. So Marvel's going to own half the copyright to these characters no matter what happens (and in the likely event that the heirs fail their bid for Spider-Man, all of their biggest character, unless Ditko's got some heirs out there who have very different political beliefs from his own); if the Kirbys get the rights to some of them, Marvel doesn't lose them, it just has to share the profits. (Which is a whole other mess in and of itself; if, for example, the Kirbys got half the X-Men rights, what would they entitled to from a movie like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which has "X-Men" right in the title but only has 3 Kirby characters in it, in very minor roles?)
Anyway! This is the kind of stuff that fascinates the hell out of me. (I realize most people do not share this fascination, and in fact explained all this to my girlfriend last night when she was complaining of insomnia in the hopes that it would cure it.)
There's also been huge news on Marvelman, but I think I'm going to split a Marvelman thread off from the Funnybooks thread and talk about it there. In the meantime it is 11:35 and, while I'm not sleepy, I figure I should at least look at some other threads for a bit rather than stay on this one topic.
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Topic: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law (Read 58769 times)