The rights dispute between the Marvel character heir and the Marvel corporation

Marvel has filed five lawsuits hoping to retain full control and ownership of Avengers characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Falcon, Thor, and other Marvel characters. News of these lawsuits was first revealed to the public by The New York Times.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has sued the heirs of several late comic geniuses including Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Gene Colan. Marvel thinks these blockbuster characters belong to them in the form of works-for-hire. If Marvel loses, Disney will have to share ownership of the billion’s worth of characters.

This lawsuit is a new move by Marvel, against the original move by the heirs of several Marvel authors to file dozens of termination notices with the US Copyright Office, seeking to terminate Marvel’s license for these characters. However, Marvel argues that the characters were created under “works-for-hire” agreements, meaning that the heirs would have no valid claim to the copyrights of those characters.

Kirby’s heirs sought to end the licensing of the characters, under a provision of the Copyright Act of 1976, but Marvel argued that they continued to own the characters because Kirby was working on the characters under the above-mentioned agreement.

After Kirby’s heirs sent 45 notices in 2009 seeking to end the transfer of comic book rights to works like “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Avengers,” and “The Fantastic Four,” Marvel sued, seeking a court order. The litigation involved a total of 262 works published between 1958 and 1963.

A federal court sided with Marvel in 2011, and an appeals court upheld the decision that Kirby’s work was “hired”.

Almost a decade ago, Toberoff represented the fortune of comic book legend Jack Kirby on whether he could end the sponsorship of the rights to Spider-Man, X-Men, Incredible Hulk and Mighty Thor. In August 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision that Kirby’s heirs could not regain their share of the rights to the characters because the former author Marvel’s freelance writer has contributed his material as a work for hire.

The Kirby case was subsequently referred to the Supreme Court, with the late judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressing a certain interest in settling the case. Marvel at the time fought hard to get its rights back, and before the judges could decide, the case was settled.

Now comes the new lawsuit. Marvel’s lawsuit is considered “virtually identical circumstances” to the Kirby case.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case, it will have enormous implications not only for Marvel, a unit of Walt Disney Co., but also for DC Comics, as it raises questions about the definition of creators. The product was created as a “hire work” during the heyday of comics in the 1950s. If the plaintiffs win, Disney hopes to retain at least part of the character’s rights as a co-writer. The studio would have to share the profits with others. In addition, the termination provisions of copyright law apply only in the United States, allowing Disney to continue to control and profit from the exploitation.

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