Disney is taking several of Marvel’s most well-known characters to court in an attempt to keep complete control of them. The studio launched a flurry of lawsuits on Friday against the heirs of numerous authors and artists trying to regain the copyrights to Spider-Man, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Black Widow and Captain Marvel, among other characters.
The lawsuits were filed on behalf of Marvel Entertainment (which Disney owns) in response to copyright termination notices issued earlier this year, requesting that the Marvel character’s rights be returned to the authors who created them. (After a set number of years, writers or their successors may regain rights from publishers under US copyright law.) These notifications, if successful, would allow Marvel to continue to use the characters while also requiring the company to split ownership and earnings with the creator’s heirs.
The estates of Marvel Comics legends Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange), Don Heck (co-creator of Iron Man, Black Widow, and Hawkeye), Don Rico (co-creator of Black Widow), Gene Colan (co-creator of Falcon, Captain Marvel and Blade) and Larry Lieber (co-creator of Iron Man, Thor, and Ant-Man and the younger brother of Stan Lee) are among those seeking termination. Marc Toberoff, an intellectual property lawyer who previously defended the heirs of Marvel comic book artist Jack Kirby and Superman founders Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster in similar disputes, is representing them all.
According to Disney’s cases, which were filed by L.A. attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli and acquired by EW, the characters in question were produced as ‘work made for hire, to which the Copyright Act’s termination provisions do not apply.’
Toberoff retaliated in a statement sent to EW: ‘At the core of these cases is an anachronistic and highly criticized interpretation of work-made-for-hire under the 1909 Copyright Act that needs to be rectified.’
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Toberoff claims the courts viewed the Copyright Act as only pertaining to conventional full-time workers for the first six decades, which Marvel’s writers and artists were not. These folks were all freelancers or independent contractors, working piecemeal for car fare out of their basements, selling by the page those pages a publisher liked. So their content was certainly not [work-for-hire] under the law at the time all these characters were developed.
As previously stated, Toberoff has previously defended creators in comparable instances. On behalf of the Man of Steel’s creators, he spent years suing DC Comics and Warner Bros. for the rights to Superman, with Warner finally winning in two different court judgments. Meanwhile, Toberoff’s lawsuit against Marvel on behalf of Kirby came close to reaching the Supreme Court before being settled in 2014.
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