Disney Suing to Keep Rights to MCU Characters

Disney is in a real battle now, this suit to retain the rights to these characters is worth billions.

Marvel Suing to Keep Rights to ‘Avengers’ Characters – The Hollywood Reporter

Disney’s Marvel unit is suing to hold onto Avengers characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Falcon, and others.

The complaints, which The Hollywood Reporter has learned are being filed today, come against the heirs of some late comic book geniuses including Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Gene Colan. The suits seek declaratory relief that these blockbuster characters are ineligible for copyright termination as works made for hire. If Marvel loses, Disney would be letting ownership of characters worth billions slip from its fingertips.

Last month, the administrator of Ditko’s estate filed a notice of termination on Spider Man, which first appeared in comic book form in 1962. Under the termination provisions of copyright law, authors or their heirs can reclaim rights once granted to publishers after waiting a statutory set period of time. According to the termination notice, Marvel would lose rights to its iconic character in June 2023.

(more in Hollywood Reporter link)

 

Oof, this is going to be a mess. I've heard that in the 70's the way rights were assigned changed for comic books. Not sure if those changes were retroactive or not. Then, IIRC, Stan Lee bought out a bunch of rights from the original creators, then played fast and loose with licensing those rights out in the 80's and 90's to keep Marvel afloat - which is why Disney had to buy a big chunk of Fox to be able to call Wanda Maximoff the Scarlet Witch.

I'm predicting that lawyers are going to be the real winners in this case.

 

The issue is legal costs for the defendants, how deep are their pockets and how far are they willing to go? One has to assume that a multinational like Disney has their own legal department, this suit gets added to the pile.

 

Screw Disney. The copyright law is clear in my eyes, I hope they loose their pants off via treble damages.

 

Work For Hire keeps rearing it's head, but I thought the standard practice had been only if you were a full time employee ala Westinghouse or GE were one's creations automatically the property of the employer. Work For Hire agreements if they are going to allow them to stand and have recognition I've always thought would be the antithesis, as in the companies were not paying for the whole creator but just itemized piecemeal work? We know they got more than the basic job from the freelance artists, and that for a long time Jack Kirby had not in fact signed away creator rights (back of check endorsements ruled to be ineligible on the basis of bank employees not being paid for witnessing a 'contract' that way).

I read a load of stuff at the time about Kirby's legal wrangles with Marvel starting with wanting original pages returned they held to raise money for his wife's health care, and it was very weighted down with various emotional and moralistic elements you had to try to read past. Work For Hire never should have been applied to creating things is how I felt it ought to have shaken out, but I understand it didn't entirely work out like it ought to have. East coast cheap and ephemeral comic books were the bottom end of publishing at the time these creations were created with a staff editior/writer and freelance artists who contributed visually and narratively. West coast Disney at that time and earlier had full time employees with benefits along with the guaranteed wage; apples and oranges. It might be a case of which 'language' will prevail?

The U.S. justice system has been proven to slip it's moorings entirely based on who is wealthiest, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that again.

 

Here's the problem, from what I understand of listening to podcasts about IP law. You are working full time for Marvel. Your boss says "come up with a new villain for the Hulk to fight." You come up with Wolverine. He's an awesome looking character with claws. He's in a few comic books. A year later, someone else uses Wolverine, filling in more detail about his powers and abilities. A year after that he gets his own series created by someone else, who fills in his backstory.

So, who "owns" Wolverine? The person who first drew him? The person who fleshed him out into a full character? The person who filled in his backstory? The company who told the employee to draw something for Hulk to beat up?

Now, what if the original artist was an employee but the guy who filled in all the backstory and detail about the character was a contractor? What if the contractor sold his rights to Marvel but the original artist didn't? What if the artist was a full time employee but the person who came up with the concept was a contractor?

It's the same situation in music, to relate back to the forum Who "wrote" a song? The person who came up with the lyrics? Maybe one person did everything except the main hook. Or the main riff. Or a band recorded a bunch of nonsense and the producer assembled it into a coherent song.

It's not always that complicated with comic books, or songwriting. Sometimes someone comes up with a character whole-cloth. The issue is that, more often than not, that isn't the case.

 

This article has a very clear and plausible description of the circumstances of the Ditko lawsuit, which apparently is behind this wider effort by Disney to get these rights resolved once and for all. The explanation of the circumstances of the ROM character is pretty useful:

Steve Ditko estate tries to regain Spider-Man, Doctor Strange copyrights

Disney is likely confident in their position since they appear to be launching this range of lawsuits in response to the Ditko lawsuit, in order to prevent any more surprise lawsuits popping up later. I imagine they want to avoid the negative publicity from a lawsuit right before a related movie is going to come out. And they figure they have as good a chance now as prevailing in these lawsuits as they would at any time in the future. They are certainly powerful enough that they can afford to take the risk of losing.

The above article also suggests that the overall trademark to Spider-Man would not be at risk, so all they would have to do is change his real name, supporting characters and other specifics from Ditko's issues. Which, at this point, they've already done with most of their characters through various reinventions over the years. As the above article says, the most likely outcome here is a settlement to buy out the rights and continue doing business as usual.

The only real negative possibility for Disney is a detail from another article, saying that the earlier Jack Kirby case was about to go to the Supreme Court, and Disney settled it right before that. So they would likely be most worried about a Supreme Court verdict, where notoriously the law can be bent in any which way possible to accommodate the personal feelings of the justices.

Steve Ditko likely would not have allowed this lawsuit if he was still alive. He was eccentric, and didn't seem that interested in pursuing any further profits off of his Marvel work. Reportedly, his only royalties came from reprints of the original Spider-Man issues he drew. He wouldn't sell valuable original artwork that he had and wouldn't do autograph signings. Ditko didn't have children, and it's his brother Patrick Ditko who is involved in the current lawsuit, someone I had never heard of before.

https://nypost.com/2012/07/03/the-se...of-spider-man/

When Greg Theakston, an artist and the editor of several Ditko books, visited the artist in his studio in 1993 to discuss a project, he saw huge stacks of Spidey pages gathering dust that could be potentially worth millions. Ditko was also using some of the art as a cutting board. Horrified, Theakston offered to buy Ditko a new cutting board, but Ditko refused with a terse “no.”

Yoe casually asked Ditko about autographing a piece of art, and the artist responded with a thoughtful tirade that it was morally wrong to sign artwork, because that’s not the intention of the artwork; it’s meant to be reproduced in a magazine.

 

I am extremely

about this.

Even though I'm a Disney stockholder, the Mouse House has been a thorn in the side of legitimate creators and owners of other properties for decades. Disney Lawyers is almost their most precious asset, and almost its' own real-world action/drama franchise. If the company had any less shame, they would make a big-budget series for Disney+ about them.

 

I say keep it in the courts for another 10 years by then hopefully nobody gives a damn about seeing another MCU movie.

 

Disney has got to watch that the heirs to the Ben Cooper Halloween costume company don't go after them too (apparently now owned by Rubie's costumes). They were selling a Halloween costume called Spider Man, with a quite similar costume design (but yellow), years before Spider-Man was introduced at Marvel. It doesn't appear anyone involved in the comics ever admitted any connection, but Ditko provided an elusive reply to the question one time. Even the company's name Ben Cooper sounds like Uncle Ben Parker's name.

The billion-dollar Spider-Man ‘cover up’

Eight years before Marvel's Spider-Man, there was Ben Cooper's Spider Man costume

 

Ditko's reply doesn't sound "elusive" so much as a polite way of saying "I don't have to defend myself to you, and in any case you haven't got a scrap of real evidence."

Re the "cutting-board pages" story, the pages as Theakston told it weren't Spider-Man artwork. They were pages of his fantasy/sf art from Marvel pre-hero books like Journey Into Mystery, Tales To Astonish etc. - certainly worth money (and some of his very best work), but not millions or anywhere near.

 

Considering in 1963 Ben Cooper released a official Spider-Man costume that replaced their old “Spider Man” costume and have made no attempts at claiming ownership up to this point, I imagine that any claim of co ownership has sailed.

 

I wish Disney just go away.. if enough say it may come true..
There greed shines the light on this dark megalomania of company.

 

To me it still needs to (as opposed to will) come down to; was someone a full actual employee of a company when they created something. For Stan Lee that is the case, for the artists who worked for Disney also, but if the freelance artists that worked for Marvel comics in the 1960s were not on staff then there was insufficient payment for creations beyond first publication. Future uses should have required further compensation so to whatever extent that is true so hangs ownership. If Ditko or whoever didn't formally sign and accept payments plus proper credits as compensation it might not matter if payments and credits were given. With Kirby they tried to pressure him to sign to have property returned to him which they held after the contract on the back of checks were found not to stand in court, and under duress and mounting health care costs he did give in on many things. This kind of ownership b.s. never went on in adult or children's text fiction publishing, or even much in the genre pulp field, it's only because comic books were looked upon as ephemeral or outright junk they got away with running roughshod over some of the artists. Many jumped to newspaper strips and their syndicates if they ever got the chance, because working for east coast comic companies was pretty much on the same level for artists as men's dirty cartoons magazines (Mr. Ditko's other main source of income).

And then they'll extend copyrights another hundred years, or even go backwards and undo public domain creations, just wait. Anything but having to deal straight with, never mind develop like Walt Disney used to, real creative people in the present. Hate the company that bears his name all you like, but it's founder was honorable; it's these sub-catalogs they are going into that have come from a much different place.

 

I'm sure Disney knows it's going to have to buy the outstanding rights. The question will come down to how much the rights are worth. Once the bean counters work that out, Disney will offer the rights-holders an enormous settlement amount that will be less than half the real value to Disney.

 

Disney = .

Evil corporation as far as Im concerned.

 

Let's just get it over with and cede all rights, patents, and licensing for everything in existence over to the Bezos empire.

 

I don't think Ditko ever acknowledged all the artwork he did for Eric Stanton's bondage comics, but his style is absolutely plain to see in them. Incidentally Stanton claimed that he did some work on Ditko's Marvel comics, and suggested things in the design - he said it was his idea to have Spider-Man wear web-shooters on his wrists. Whether that's true or not, I'm quite certain that Ditko's artwork for Dr Strange was influenced by fetish imagery.

 

Maybe Dr. Strange could've been Dr. Kink?

 

Hard to say any ship has sailed, after all, this lawsuit is based on Ditko's work from that same timeframe. I would guess the Halloween costume name or design was never trademarked, so I imagine that could be a problem. Without a trademark, they might have the burden to prove Marvel actually knew of their costume and used it for inspiration to prevail in a lawsuit. Otherwise, they should be able to retain the right to produce Spider Man costumes based on their own design without getting a license from Marvel, since they have evidence they originated the idea of Spider Man costumes, but they might not get to claim any damages from Marvel based on their similarly named and designed character.

 

I'm sure Stan Lee would have been happy with removing the Men out of X-men. Not!
Can't wait to see so many woke mutants.....screw Disney

Marvel Studios May Drop The 'Men' From X-Men

 

Is there any reason Frosty The Snowman can't be a ______________?

 

X-Men have been "woke" since day one. They're a creation of Jewish authors intended as a stand in/allegory for all the ways in which people are different from the "norm" are mistreated.

 

I'm not even an MCU fan but I hope to hell things go the way they ought to and Marvel retains the rights. Disney is out of control.

 

It is worth noting that it's probably untrue that Ditko used any of his original art as a cutting board. Theakston saw one piece of Ditko art which was cut up, and made the assumption that Ditko had been using it as a cutting board. He didn't see Ditko using it that way, and Ditko never said he was using it that way. And people who knew Ditko say it is unlikely he would have used it that way. Most likely the page had been damaged unintentionally, in some other manner. There's a more detailed discussion of this here.

Theakston only saw one damaged page, and it turns out it was from a Charlton comic, not a Marvel comic.