Back in March, Thomas Denton posted on his blog about a charity auction he was putting together to benefit Candlelighters, an organization that helps out the families of kids with cancer. Earlier this month, he put the first items up for bid on eBay. Now two of those items, which featured Superman, have been removed by eBay, as they were notified by Warner Bros. that the listings violated “intellectual property rights.” Denton details what happened on his blog:

I messed up. I just got notice that two of the Superman related auctions have been removed from the site and the rest are probably next. I don’t know what to do now. I have to start canceling auctions and issuing refunds. That means all the fees and such I’m now responsible for which is money i just don’t have, and I have no idea if I’m still obligated to the middleman ebay uses for their charity auctions.

I’ve gone ahead and canceled the auctions still running that featured Warner Bros properties. I’m not sure what to do about the ones (like the ones that were canceled by DC) that are already completed. I’ll be talking to ebay, paypal, missionfish (the people that handle ebay’s charity donations) the artists and auction winners.

ALL ARTISTS! If you have done a DC comics related piece, DO NOT MAIL IT! KEEP IT! If I already have it, I’ll ship it back to you ASAP. Or, if your piece is not DC related and you just don’t want to part of this any more for whatever reason, please say so. I’ll understand completely.

I am heartbroken. I am really sorry to any one this is any trouble for. Legally, I was in the wrong. I used their intellectual property without their permission. I’m not going to play the victim on that front. I swear I just wanted to do something good.

This decision by Time Warner isn’t making them any friends, as evidenced by this thread on Millarworld. Evan Dorkin, who provided a Milk & Cheese piece for the auction (as seen in this very post), also comments:

The letter from e-bay that Thomas received states that it was the use of DC copyrighted characters that got them noticed and squelched the auctions, although I wonder if it was also the use of the Superman silhouette in the listings (and perhaps the accompanying text alluding to Superman?) that got them noticed. Only a corporate lawyer or a complete cretin could think that constituted DC’s involvement or approval, but, that’s life in the big wide business world. Cripes. You’d think someone could let this go, for a cancer-related charity, it’s a limited deal, and there are hundreds of other DC-related fan art and pro commission auctions on e-bay set up for personal gain that they don’t bring the hammer down on.

I think it’s bullshit, and I know it’s easy to have a knee-jerk “corporations suck” response like this, but, well, this sucks. If Thomas Denton overstepped his bounds, he was being naive, and he was trying to do a good thing that really isn’t going to hurt poor Warner Brothers/DC, and someone in a suit could have made this right with a little work. Or quietly tossed in some bucks to the charity to cover the deal and been heroes about it even while stepping on someone’s good efforts. I know, it only works that way in the movies.

As Denton points out in a later post on his blog, this probably has little to do with DC Comics and more to do with a Time Warner lawyer who gets paid to search eBay for pictures of Superman. “Please don’t send nasty emails to DC,” Denton says. “They probably have no idea this even happened. What probably happened here was some suit saw something for sale with Superman on it and didn’t go any further.” And technically, I’m sure they’re in the right, but it seems very heavy-handed, especially given the number of pieces still out there on eBay featuring sketches of various DC and Warner Bros. characters. And what’s next, prohibiting artists from sketching their characters at conventions? Because essentially that’s what we’re talking about here — someone sketching DC characters for money … in this case, money for a charity.

In the meantime, there’s still other non-Time Warner artwork up for auction, by folks like Jeff Parker, Judd Winick and Tony Talbert.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 7:21 am and is filed under Creators, DC Comics, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.