The Copyright Battle of Steel

In one of the more interesting battles over (eternally extended, because under original 28-year copyright we'd all own the Man of Tomorrow, today) copyrights, a new victory for creators vs. corporations in the highly convoluted battle over the legal rights to Superman. The nub of this week's development:

Last year a Federal judge decided that Time Warner was no longer the sole proprietor of Superman, and that the heirs of Jerome Siegel (of Siegel and Shuster) are entitled to a share of the US copyright to the character. This week a court ruled again, giving the Siegel family a larger share of the intellectual copyright…..The court had awarded the Siegel family with many aspects of the Superman copyright, including the basis of the Superman character, his costume, his alter-ego reporter Clark Kent, Lois Lane, the Daily Planet newspaper, and the Clark/Superman and Lois love triangle storyline.

But the ruling did not give the family the full Superman copyright because DC Comics owns some of the important elements identified with the character, including his ability to fly, vision powers, the term Kryptonite, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and "expanded origins."

….on Wednesday, Judge Stephen Larson awarded the Siegel family rights to more additional works, including the first two weeks of the daily Superman newspaper comicstrips, as well as the early Action Comics and Superman comicbooks. What this means is that the Siegels now control depictions of Superman's origin story. Everything from the planet Krypton, his parents Jor-L and Lora, the launching of the infant Kal-L into space by his parents as Krypton is destroyed

The whole court case is really to determine how much money Warner Bros. and DC owe the Siegel Family from profits they collected from Superman since 1999. And to make matters worse, copyright law will five the Siegel family full ownership of Superman in 2013. This is the date that matters, because after 2013, the Siegels could bring the property to other movie and television studios. So if Warner Bros wants to produce a new Superman movie before they are forced to pay major bucks for the rights, they will need to go into production by 2011.

Some background on the meaning to the comic book industry of this battle.

My May 2001 Reason magazine article on the superhero's strange persistence, which will also appear in the forthcoming anthology, Best American Comic Book Criticism of the 21st Century, edited by Ben Schwartz.