Over the past week, there’s been a considerable amount of speculation as to what the Siegel decision means for the future of the Superman franchise. There’s also been some discussion as to how the Siegel family could regain fifty-percent share of the Superman copyright decades after Siegel and Shuster sold it to the company that we now know as DC Comics.
If you’re one of those confused by all this, don’t worry. You’re not alone. The law in this case is really complex — the history even more so — and that has understandably given rise to a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
In this post, we’re going to do what the law clerks most likely did when advising the judge: distill the whirl of claims and questions into a simple timeline. Our main focus for now: concerns that the ruling may spell the end of Superman.
April 16, 1999: The date that, according to the judge’s ruling, the Siegel heirs legally regained co-ownership of the Superman material in Action Comics #1. How is this possible if copyright lasts for life + 70 years? If, as some have explained, the Siegels got this right due to a change in copyright law back in 1976, why didn’t they claim it earlier? Does this mean that there can be no Superman comics, movies or merchandise without the Siegels’ permission? Can the Siegels really sell Superman to a rival publisher? Even if DC retains some creative control, will the Siegel payout make the Superman franchise unprofitable? And what does the ruling mean for aspects of the Superman mythos that weren’t in Action Comics #1?
2006: Superboy (Kon-El) dies in Infinite Crisis. Did DC kill him off because of the Siegels’ lawsuit? What does the most recent opinion mean for the future of the Superboy character?
2013: The year that the Siegels’ lawyer said the remaining copyright interest in Superman would revert to the heirs of Joe Shuster. Why didn’t the Shusters reclaim their share at the same time as the Siegels? If the Shuster family gets the other 50%, is it true that they’ll have total control over the Superman character? Will DC, Time Warner and Warner Bros. then have to obtain a license from the families to do anything related to Superman?
2018: Is it true, as some are saying, that if the Siegels and Shusters refuse to license Superman material, in 2018 DC & co. will lose the Superman trademark and it will revert to the co-creators’ families? Will the families truly be able to sell the Superman copyright and trademark to Marvel comics?
2033: According to a number of observers, this is when Superman enters the public domain. Why 2033? If Superman enters the public domain, does that mean that anyone will be able to publish their own Superman comics?
????: When will other creators or their families be able to regain their copyright interest in comics characters? Will any creators from after the Golden Age be able to take their characters back?
Now that we have a sense of where we’re going and what’s at stake, over the next few posts we’ll address what the Siegel case means for all of these issues as well as other related questions. Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter in our saga!
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:17 am
Does Joe Shuster have any remaining heirs? I thought I’d read that there are none. If so, how does THAT factor into all of this? Does someone, somewhere control his estate?
Here’s an offbeat, but timely, question… The latest issue of All Star Superman (#10) ends with someone (guess who!) in another universe — the one that Supes himself only recently created (I’m not at all clear how he simply did this, but that’s Grant Morrison for you) — sketching what it is most certainly the Superman of Action Comics #1. Days after the issue was released, BAM! The ruling comes down.
Could the last two issues of A-S Supes (the series will end with #12), and any reprints of the story, be in jeopardy because of this?
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:25 am
Come to think of it, A-S Supes comes out so irregularly that issue #11 probably wasn’t going to make it out until Xmas time anyhow. Perhaps there’s plenty of time to straighten all of this out.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
The 2033 date is false. That’s the date year that it would’ve entered the public domain -if- it were work-for-hire, in which case the copyright runs out after 95 years.
However, as this case confirmed, the material in Action #1 was -not- work-for-hire. For such materials, the end limit of the copyright (under current law) is life-of-the-creator-plus-70. If I’m remembering correctly, for collaborations it’s the death of the last survivor that’s important, which means that the end date is 2066 (70 years after Siegel’s death.)
Which means that, assuming they end up buying out the rights, it’s actually to Time Warner’s benefit that Superman was work-for-hire; they get to keep it out of the public domain much longer in this case. (It also suggests that giving Joe health coverage was wise even beyond its kindliness — every year they kept him alive meant another year of copyright!)
And no, Joe had not descendants, but he did have an estate, did have people who become his heirs. While earlier reversion laws limited the recapture to the creator, a surviving spouse, and decendants, the later reversion law expanded that to others.
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Nat, did you mean to say “…Time Warner’s benefit that Superman was NOT work for hire”?
The whole public domain thing puzzles me. I don’t really see why, if a company like Time Warner/DC has the rights to a character like Supes, why it should ever become public domain if they keep the character active.
Not that I’m a big fan of corporate America, and it’s not likely it’ll happen in my lifetime (I’ll be 96 should I make it to 2066), but what is the reasoning behind this?
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
I’ll be addressing the Shuster situation in a separate post.
The same with the public domain & trademark, which really is a cutting-edge issue. When the expiration of copyright was just a question, say, of being able to reprint Martin Chuzzlewit, no big–folks just reprinted Martin Chuzzlewit. Now we have multi-platform trademarks and copyrighted serial characters, which makes things rather complicated.
As I’ve tried to illustrate here, a crucial part of addressing a legal question is framing the right questions. That’s why I wrote the “deadline dooms” post the way I did–for the most part not stating “this is how it is” but “this is what people say it is, and we need to figure out if that’s right.” We’ll be coming back to all of the dates noted there–e.g., 2013, 2018, 2033–and discussing whether or not they matter and if so, how.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Yes, yes, I did the dreaded missing “not”… assuming they buy out the rights it is to Time Warner’s benefit that it was not work for hire.
As for why things go into the public domain eventually — while there is certainly some argument against it (and plenty of argument for it, not trying to say otherwise, our culture is richer in ways for not having to pay royalties to perform Romeo & Juliet or for everyone being allowed to include Santa Claus in their story), there is a far more practical reason: it’s in the Constitution. Congress is only empowered to give such exclusive rights “for a limited time” (although that time has expanded vastly from the early days). However, trademark does not bear such limitations — you can keep trademarks as long as you use them and protect them.