I am referring specifically to this one about how it's totally cool that Marvel didn't give any royalties to anybody for the Avengers movie:
I don’t like that Jack Kirby got screwed over by Marvel back in the day. I don’t like it at all. It’s a sad story. It’s as tragic as the story of the men who created Superman. These guys got screwed over. But that was over 40 years go,guys. The men involved are dead and buried. The policies that screwed them over were changed decades ago. Things have changed for the better, even when it comes to doing work-for-hire with the big two. I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from this. I’m saying we’ve ALREADY learned from it. I have no doubt that we learned from it. The black and white creator-owned books of the 80s. The exodus of Marvel creators to form Image in the 90s. The indy comics movement now. Webcomics. Kickstarter. We’ve learned this lesson, folks. You’re getting angry over nothing. You’re suiting up for a battle we’ve already won.
This, not to put too fine a point on it, is total fucking horseshit.
Ask Marv Wolfman. Ask Ken Penders. Ask Robert Washington, except you can't because he died in the gutter.
Coming back to the post you linked, though:
Creators don’t lose their rights unless they sign them away
Kinda needs an asterisk.
For starters, prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, creators lost all kinds of fucking rights without ever signing a damn thing. Kirby didn't sign shit (at least, not prior to 1973), and everyone who posts in a thread about Kirby getting screwed with "Well he should have gotten a lawyer to look over the contract before he signed it" deserves a swift kick in the nuts.
Even allowing for the point that, starting in 1978, work-for-hire has to be agreed upon in advance, creation's not always so clearly-cut. While it's true that Neil Gaiman won out, and deserved to, in his litigation against McFarlane, there are plenty of cases where the creator still gets screwed.
Going with the examples I chose:
Wolfman created Blade independently. (Yes, this was prior to 1978, but that's not really relevant in this case; unlike the Kirby case, Wolfman produced clear and unambiguous evidence that he created Blade on his own and then pitched him to Marvel.) But a judge ruled that the Blade who Marvel ultimately published was sufficiently different from Wolfman's original pitch to constitute a discrete, work-for-hire creation.
Ken Penders, Scott Shaw, Elliot S Maggin, and others allege that Archie never made them sign a contract in the 1990's -- which means that they still own every word they wrote and every line they drew, and that Archie has spent the last couple of decades reprinting their copyrighted work (and using their original characters) without their permission and without compensating them.
And Robert Washington was never legally acknowledged alongside McDuffie and Leon as co-creator of Static. They got royalties (and, unless I'm mistaken, Leon continues to get them and so does McDuffie's widow); he didn't. Now, I don't mean to speak ill of McDuffie; by all accounts he was a great guy, and he's not around anymore to defend himself -- I'm sure he felt he was justified in declaring only himself and Leon as the creators of Static. But I think he was wrong; I think co-writing a character's first appearance qualifies as co-creation (because copyright is based on the expression, not the conception, of an idea), and I think it's a legitimate tragedy that Washington did not receive his share in credit, ownership, or profit.
Hell, look at Kurtz's own reasoning in that Avengers post: he points out that the Avengers movie bears a closer resemblance to Millar and Hitch's Ultimates than Lee, Kirby, and Heck's Avengers -- ergo for some reason none of those people deserve any money for the movie. I'm not gonna lie, I have a lot of trouble following his logic there. (Maybe it's because if Disney were to give a million dollars to each of the dozen or so people who wrote and drew the comics it was based on then it would be forced into bankruptcy? Maybe Scott Kurtz is just terrible at math.) I don't see that as implying that it's okay to deny profits to Kirby's heirs. I see it as an indictment of Marvel for continuing to shaft current writers and artists like Millar and Hitch.