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A Win for Warner Bros. in Superman Copyright Battle
Jan Wolfe
The Litigation Daily
01-14-2013
O'Melveny & Myers scored a big win for Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. on Thursday in the company's ugly copyright battle with the heirs to the creators of Superman.
In a 6-page ruling [PDF], the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the heirs of now-deceased Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel signed away their rights to the Man of Steel in a 2001 agreement with Warner Brothers. The Siegel family, represented by famed (some would say infamous) Hollywood attorney Marc Toberoff, had argued that the 2001 deal wasn't binding. The Ninth Circuit rejected that argument, noting that Siegel's lawyer at the time called the agreement a "monumental accord." The ruling deals the Siegels a major blow in their decades-long bid to increase their share of the Superman profits.
Siegel and fellow cartoonist Joseph Shuster created the Superman character in the 1932. Six years later, they sold their rights in the character to Detective Comics (now Warner Brothers subsidiary DC Comics Inc.) for just $130 and a contract to supply the publisher with material. Decades later, Warner Brothers gave Siegel and Shuster lifetime pensions of $20,000 per year, even though it said it had "no legal obligation" to do so. After both Siegel and Shuster died in 1999, their family members tried to reclaim their copyrights based on a little-noted provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 that allows artists to regain control of their works after 35 years—so-called "termination rights."
