And the plot thickens.

Now what, exactly, needs to be settled in the next 60 days?

I apologize if that’s a dumb question, but with the news of the award to the Siegel family last week I’m unclear as to what’s in need of settling here (as pertains to Superman, that is. Not Superboy). What, precisely, will the trial in November(if no settlement is reached) be about?

From may point of view and maybe I wrong, I think Time/Warner should bring in the Shuester estate too. Settle everything to 2013. Figure out what the pot is to get the rights and divide it 50 /50 between estates. I this point one estate get way mor than the other would be wrong.

I doubt this would happen. It is hard for moe to she time Warner being able to come up with something that the Sielge would think is fair and just.

Who exactly is the Shuester estate? I thought Joe Shuester didn’t have any kids.

Jeff, thanks for posting all of this useful information. Until you referred to the 1998 amendments as Sonny Bono’s, I had no idea he was behind them. Could you (or did you already) direct us to some background on Bono’s thinking on these amendments (as a musician I can imagine WHY he would be interested in these matters of course…)

Since this is the anniversary of Action Comics #1 it would indeed be great PR for this to be settled now. DC of course has to protect their intrest,or Maybe its Time -Warner,but they are stuck with what was done by the Detective Comics/National Periodical Publications so many years ago. Speaking just as a fan for almost 50 years I would love to see this setled .

This means the rights for Spider-Man will revert to the actual creators, DC, in 2009, followed by Green Lantern Armor Wars Jim Shooter Axis Ammendment Sonny Bono Cher Initiative Captain Shazam Destro Hama Act in 2010 to give charitable hero rights back to the creators business interests and family heirs of the foreseeable future copyright extension laws quarterly profit margin.

Jerry Siege must be rolling around in his grave

How ironic it would be if DC were to cease using the Superman and replace his role in the DCU with a similar character: Captain Marvel. “Action Comics featuring Captain Marvel”–sounds like cosmic justice.

Once again, we await the heirs of Nietzsche…

I just thought of something the other day. Wasn’t Superman originally supposed to be an evil bald future guy? (An illustrated story by Siegel and Schuster with this theme, from their high school days I think, was reprinted in some DC encyclopedia hardcover.) Would ideas present in that story (such as the evil bald guy) then be available for reclaimation?

Seems to me that there needs to be fairness. Perhaps DC should offer the two families of the creators 0.5 % of profits from Superman and related merchandise from this point on?

And if the case solely is revolving around Action Comics #1 material, doesn’t this severely limit what the two families should receive?

I have no idea what the details are, but wasn’t there some sort of settlement directly with the two gentlemen before their deaths? Or was there a settlement with other issues unresolved that those gentlement where involved with?

Part of me believes that if the two creators reached a settlement with DC that should have been the end of it. If not, then their should be a decent resolution now for direct family members only, not third cousins once removed from Aunt Berta’s side of the family that just wanna get some free cash.

“I don’t understand why so many refuse to acknowledge this.”

Because with some people, all they read is that distant relatives want money for something that a relative whom they haven’t met had made. A lot of people think that all people are greedy, so when they just read “estate,” they think vehicle for greed.

“Because with some people, all they read is that distant relatives want money for something that a relative whom they haven’t met had made.”

I’d like to know how it is that Siegel’s wife and daughter never met him, especially since his wife was the model for Lois Lane.

The saddest part of all this is how it suggests that fictional heroes do a poor job of inspiring their readers to think heroically. Instead, we see comments like the one above, a fact-impaired, dishonest, and misogynistic effort in mispunctuation, apparently inspired by paranoia that this might keep the writer from getting the comic book he wants, and that goes against his feeling of unearned entitlement.

Fighting to keep an old widow lady from getting what is rightfully hers under the law doesn’t sound like any sort of heroism I’d recognize.

I hope they get nothing. Seigel and Shuster sold the rights how many times and if they made bad deals that is their own fault. I have no sympathy at all for their estates.

I just have to say that while I can sort of understand the point of view of the estates in a pragmatic way, it does strike me as sort of self-centered.

I feel as though they are just attempting to get money out of a vaguely random situation. After all, their families have not owned Superman for decades, and I highly doubt they’ve been sitting around crying to themselves and counting the days until they had the rights again. I mean, what use are the rights without a vehicle for publishing the character, which DC provides? The whole thing has the look of a “we want a settlement, but we’re going to push as far as we possibly can so that the settlement can be huge.”

And while I would never deny that what they are doing is within their legal rights, legal rights do not always line up with moral justification. In other words, they can be self-centered and greedy and still be following all the laws.

I doubt if DC could create a Superman-like character, legally. That would infringe on the rights of the owners of Superman, much like it was alleged that Captain Marvel infringed on Superman in the early ’40s. I don’t know how much interest the Siegels have in producing their own Superman comic, I’d guess that they will entertain bids for licensing rights to the character, not just from DC but from whoever might want the character.

“Jerry Siegel, to his dying day, lamented the fact that he sold the rights to Superman so cheaply. But of course, I like to think and research before I post on the internet.”

Believe it or not, I was looking for information like this. Where did you get that except about Siegel on his deathbed from? I kind of hope you don’t say from an interview by his wife, haha.

“Believe it or not, I was looking for information like this. Where did you get that except about Siegel on his deathbed from? I kind of hope you don’t say from an interview by his wife, haha. ”

I think I read it in Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow. I also read the press release that Jerry Siegel released back in the ’70’s, and he seemed to regret selling Superman and trusting certain individuals at National.

I can actually agree with a fair amount of the criticism leveled at my original post. Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about these sorts of situations. However, part of the point I was making about having the vehicle for publishing that DC provides, which I didn’t explain well, is that if you look at the ruling they only have the rights to the first comic, which does not contain all that much of what people consider to be Superman. Were they to attempt to publish themselves or through a different company, they would have to almost create a new character; none of the villains we know, no Jimmy Olsen, no Kryptonite, a lack of a fair amount of the powers we associate with, such as flight which is almost synonymous with Superman nowadays, and you begin to wonder what comics about such a character would even be like.

I’m pretty sure we can all at least sort of agree that part of Superman’s continued success is a kind of nostalgia centered on a world and characters we grew up with; characters that, aside from Superman himself and Lois Lane as far as I understand it, the family does not hold the rights to. Given the sheer amount of difficulty that DC itself has had over the years any time they try to change the Superman formula even a little bit, I have a hard time believing that Superman would be all that successful outside of the world DC created for him. More than anything, I think the loss of Lex Luthor, often considered to be the best, and perhaps only good, Superman villain would probably cut possible profits via another publishing venue… if not in half, then at least by a sizable margin.

I also reiterate my point that having the right to do so does not make doing so morally just. As someone pointed out above, apparently the creators regretted their decision to sell Superman later in life, which is unfortunate. However, they did still sell those rights and while I do believe they should be given their due and probably paid some reasonable amount in line with the success of the character I do not think they deserve rights that the actual creators sold.

“I do not think they deserve rights that the actual creators sold.”

If so, does Time Warner deserve the rights that they didn’t buy? At the time the rights were sold, there were only 56 years of copyright to sell. When Congress decided to retroactively extend copyright terms, it was a gift from the American people (who would’ve otherwise gained the rights to the material as public domain) to the copyright holders, and it was Congress (acting as representatives of the American people) who chose to allow the creators or their families to have part of that gift. And the inclusion of the creator, or (in the event of his death) the creator’s widow/widower and offspring in the gift was specifically intended for cases very much like the Superman case, where the rights to something valuable were sold for not much early on.

And if I understand the law in use here (and this is something I hope Jeff will go more into and clear up), even if the 1970s law had been in place in 1938, this still would not have been Jerry’s right to sell. The rights of recapture were not his to sell or give away; if he had said in his will “I give my rights of recapture to Nat Gertler”, I still wouldn’t have gotten them (dadgummit!). The right of recapture materials under this pre-Sonny Bono act law went specifically to the surviving spouse and offspring, it was not part of an estate, not something that was the creator’s to choose who gets… and thus not something he had to sell.