Sunday Mailbag: Marvel Lawsuits?

Q: What are your thoughts on The Walt Disney Company’s barrage of lawsuits on Friday?

A: Here’s a link to another story about this issue. For those tl;dr folks here’s the brief version: Earlier this year the heirs/estates of several artists and writers who created Marvel characters like Spider-Man, Thor, etc. filed lawsuits against Disney (owners of Marvel) claiming copyrights to the characters should revert back to them after a 60 year time limit under the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Disney recently filed countersuits saying the characters were created under a “work for hire” arrangement, and therefore the copyright claims are invalid.

My thoughts? There’s not a lot to say about it from a legal standpoint. The crux of the legal issue is if the artists and writers in question were working under a “work for hire” arrangement or not. If they were, then they have no copyright claim. It’s that simple. The courts will decide if they were WFH or not. It was industry practice for creators to be WFH at the time, so unless Marvel did not have the creators sign WFH agreements and the working relationship and process was not in line with standard WFH definitions, I suspect Disney will end up winning these cases.

It will be interesting to hear the details of the working process with the creators, and if Marvel nee Timely Comics had the foresight to require WFH agreements with everyone back in the day. I have absolutely no idea how it all worked back then with Marvel, but it will all come down to that. I know at E.C. and MAD back in the 50’s Bill Gaines required WFH agreements. Cartoonist Arnold Roth famously refused to do work for MAD because of that agreement, so WFH was very much part of the industry well before the time period these Marvel characters were created.

That said, I do have a couple of other thoughts, since you asked.

Ordinarily I’d always side with the creators rather than the giant, soulless, corporate behemoths, but these cases are a little more complicated than that. I can actually see the side of the giant, soulless corporate behemoths.

First, these characters that we all grew up loving and enjoying the adventures of didn’t spring fully grown from the minds of their creators like Athena from Zeus. Sure, they were thought up/created by individuals, but the characters are we know them today evolved through the contributions of many writers and artists over the decades, and that was because they were owned by a company that continued to publish stories and hire new creators to add to the mythos. At best, the credit of ‘creator’ of any character that’s continually been published over six plus decades is a shared one, and the publisher deserves credit for its stewardship of the character.

Second, only one of the “creators” who are looking to regain the copyrights of these characters from Disney is an actual creator. That is Larry Lieber, who is Stan Lee‘s brother and claims to be co-creator of Iron-Man, Thor, and Ant-Man. He scripted many of the earliest stories of those characters from Stan’s plots, so at least he contributed to the characters in a direct way. The rest are all the “heirs” or “estates” of creators. None of them created a damn thing. It’s tough to drum up any sympathy for people who are suing not to regain control of a character they created in order to do more with it, but to cash in on something they had nothing to do with and contributed nothing to because grandpa was talented.

I’m a big proponent of protecting the copyrights of creators, but great fictional characters are immortal and creators are not. Personally I think the copyrights to a fictional character should become public domain with the death of their creator, unless that creator legally transfers the copyrights to another owner before their death or in a will. Then we know the original creator’s wishes with their creation are being fulfilled. Of course no one pumping out cheaply printed comics in the 60’s thought their creations would become the long lasting modern day mythological characters and multi-million dollar properties they are today. That’s why they created them mostly under work for hire agreement without much thought to their share of copyrights.

Time and the courts will tell.

Thanks to Robert Burke for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about  cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!