Truth, Justice and the American Way

[khaosworks]

By way of Mark Evanier's blog:

March 29, 2008
Creator’s Family Reclaims the Rights to Superman
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Time Warner is no longer the sole proprietor of Superman.

A federal judge here on Wednesday ruled that the heirs of Jerome Siegel — who 70 years ago sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130 — were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character. The ruling left intact Time Warner’s international rights to the character, which it has long owned through its DC Comics unit.

And it reserved for trial questions over how much the company may owe the Siegel heirs for use of the character since 1999, when their ownership is deemed to have been restored. Also to be resolved is whether the heirs are entitled to payments directly from Time Warner’s film unit, Warner Brothers, which took in $200 million at the domestic box office with “Superman Returns” in 2006, or only from the DC unit’s Superman profits.

Still, the ruling threatened to complicate Warner’s plans to make more films featuring Superman, including another sequel and a planned movie based on the DC Comics’ “Justice League of America,” in which he joins Batman, Wonder Woman and other superheroes to battle evildoers.

If the ruling survives a Time Warner legal challenge, it may also open the door to a similar reversion of rights to the estate of Mr. Shuster in 2013. That would give heirs of the two creators control over use of their lucrative character until at least 2033 — and perhaps longer, if Congress once again extends copyright terms — according to Marc Toberoff, a lawyer who represents the Siegels and the Shuster estate.

“It would be very powerful,” said Mr. Toberoff, speaking by telephone on Friday. “After 2013, Time Warner couldn’t exploit any new Superman-derived works without a license from the Siegels and Shusters.”

Time Warner lawyers declined to discuss the decision, a spokesman said. A similar ruling in 2006 allowed the Siegels to recapture their rights in the Superboy character, without determining whether Superboy was, in fact, the basis for Warner Brothers’s “Smallville” television series. The decision was later challenged in a case that has yet to be resolved, said Mr. Toberoff, who represented the family in that action.

This week’s decision by Stephen G. Larson, a judge in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, provided long-sought vindication to the wife and daughter of Mr. Siegel, who had bemoaned until his death in 1996 having parted so cheaply with rights to the lucrative hero.

“We were just stubborn,” Joanne Siegel, Mr. Siegel’s widow, said in a joint interview with her daughter, Laura Siegel Larson. “It was a dream of Jerry’s, and we just took up the task.”

The ruling specifically upheld the Seigels’ copyright in the Superman material published in Detective Comics’ Action Comics Vol. 1. The extent to which later iterations of the character are derived from that original was not determined by the judge.

In an unusually detailed narrative, the judge’s 72-page order described how Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster, as teenagers at Glenville High School in Cleveland, became friends and collaborators on their school newspaper in 1932. They worked together on a short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” in which their famous character first appeared not as hero, but villain.

By 1937, the pair were offering publishers comic strips in which the classic Superman elements — cape, logo and Clark Kent alter-ego — were already set. When Detective Comics bought 13 pages of work for its new Action Comics series the next year, the company sent Mr. Siegel a check for $130, and received in return a release from both creators granting the company rights to Superman “to have and hold forever,” the order noted.

In the late 1940s, a referee in a New York court upheld Detective Comics’ copyright, prompting Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster to drop their claim in exchange for $94,000. More than 30 years later, DC Comics (the successor to Detective Comics) gave the creators each a $20,000-per-year annuity that was later increased to $30,000. In 1997, however, Mrs. Siegel and her daughter served copyright termination notices under provisions of a 1976 law that permits heirs, under certain circumstances, to recover rights to creations.

Mr. Toberoff, their lawyer, has been something of a gadfly to Warner in the past. In the late 1990s, for example, he represented Gilbert Ralston, a television writer, in a legal battle over his rights in the CBS television series “The Wild Wild West,” which was the basis for a 1999 Warner Brothers film that starred Will Smith. The case, said Mr. Toberoff, was settled.

Compensation to the Siegels would be limited to any work created after their 1999 termination date. Income from the 1978 “Superman” film, or the three sequels that followed in the 1980s, are not at issue. But a “Superman Returns” sequel being planned with the filmmaker Bryan Singer (who has also directed “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men”) might require payments to the Siegels, should they prevail in a demand that the studio’s income, not just that of the comics unit, be subject to a court-ordered accounting.

Mrs. Siegel and Ms. Larson said it was too soon to make future plans for the Superman character. But they were inclined to relish this moment.

“I have lived in the shadow of this my whole life,” Ms. Larson said. “I am so happy now, I just can’t explain it.”

The full decision can be read in PDF format here, and there's a couple of write-ups here and here, the latter by William Patry, who wrote the definitive treatise on copyright (I cited liberally from him in my thesis and he's now Google's legal counsel). As Patry notes:

The dramatic sounding nature of the final paragraph of the opinion has to be put in context though. The opinion doesn’t cover Schuster’s interests, which are not subject to Section 304(c) termination, but rather a future 304(d) termination. Nor does the opinion reach the work for hire question for anything after the (justly famous and important) Action Comics Vol. 1 published on April 18, 1938 – the collateral estoppel applied on work for hire only covers Action Comics Vol. 1. Finally, there are very thorny issues of apportionment. All of these issues are likely to be the subject of subsequent motions and possibly trial.

I expect Warner to be appealing as well. Still reading through the grounds myself.

Comments

What made Mr Walt Disney so successful (and rich)?

[susanscookietin.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with the laws in US, but from a commercial point of view, aren't the heirs trying to make the publisher pay for the author's bad business acumen? DC Comics made tonnes (& tonnes) of money from Superman, but when they paid the sum of $130 to Siegel and Shuster, did they know that it would become such a legend? It was a business risk that DC took, and like all business risks, that investment could have turned out to be a very bad one. With hindsight, Siegel and Shuster could (and should) have seen their lawyer, who would no doubt have negotiated a better deal for them. Perhaps they were desperate and financially in a very bad shape, so they accepted anything that came along, even (again, with hindsight), a "bad" deal.

Re: What made Mr Walt Disney so successful (and rich)?

[opadit.livejournal.com]

The American copyright law lets heirs do just that: terminate the transfer of copyright (that is, take the copyright back from the person the author sold it to) if, years later, it turns out that the work was worth a lot more than the author could have dreamed. It's seen as a concession to fairness.

The statute has a lot of fiddly requirements and deadlines for the heirs to meet regarding giving notice that they intend to exercise the right. If they met those requirements -- and it looks as though they did -- then Warner doesn't have a case.

The overarching policy question will be whether Congress will amend the copyright law to extend the term of copyright (again). If they do, then likely it would mean a longer stretch of time between the transfer of copyright and the date when heirs can choose to terminate the transfer. That gives the purchaser more time to make scads of money off the work, say, by making more movies, before the heirs can take it back.

Re: What made Mr Walt Disney so successful (and rich)?

[susanscookietin.livejournal.com]

So Congress was trying to play Superman, but this time the nearest phone booth happened to be Tardis.

Re: What made Mr Walt Disney so successful (and rich)?

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

As the court noted, at one time, the US copyright was 28 years with an option to renew. It was expected that the creator would be able to renegotiate assignments at the renewal. Then the Supreme Court interpreted an assignment to include the renewal period.

Subsequently, Congress retroactively changed it to the life plus system we now use. (Orginally 50, then extended to 70.) As part of that modification, Congress also decided to allow terminations, in part under the assumption that creators would not have expected the extension.

The most amusing part of the opinion is the court's handling of the fact that the termination notice failed to include the pre-Action Comics #1 advertisements. The court held, legitimately, that any copyrights in those images were not terminated - but then noted that all they showed was a man in a black and white costume, with an indecipherable chest emblem, strong enough to lift a car.