Rik said:

>>Brady posted:

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
um, no it's not. not really, anyway. The Siegels were fully within their rights to file this - no approval process necessary. You file, it happens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's right. The Siegels filed for, and got a piece of paper. The Siegels claim it means one thing, WB claims it means another. Either they will come to an agreement, or they will go to court.<<

huh? could we back the logic train up a station or two?

Rik, the arguement was that the Siegels had applied, and the paper was merely an 'application' that (I assume Darren meant) was yet to be acted on.

It's not. It's a valid document claiming termination of the transfer of copyright which means that 1/2 of Superman's copyright reverts back to the Siegels. That's at least how the government sees it.

As I laid out in my post, and you restated, TW is free to contest it, but for now, in the eyes of the law and the US Copyright office, I would lean towards saying that the Siegels are the co-owners of Superman's copyright.

At least that's what their lawyer says....

Matt

Hey John Roberson:

ROFL!! Your response was inspired! Although drug induced! LOL!

>>As I laid out in my post, and you restated, TW is free to contest it, but for now, in the eyes of the law and the US Copyright office, I would lean towards saying that the Siegels are the co-owners of Superman's copyright.<<

From my conversations with the interested parties (some of which were off the record), I'd say the current negotiations and differing interpretations of the law revolve around exactly what it is the Siegel's now are co-owners of...in terms of ancillary and derivative characters and concepts, especially.

This is pure speculation, but I'd bet DC is arguing to limit the Siegels' ownership to only those characters and concepts introduced in the first ten years (1938-48) when S&S were officially the creative force behind the feature (and maybe even to only those characters and concepts introduced in the material prepared before the initial contract with DC was signed in late '37).

This is, to my mind, a legitimate difference of opinion as to what the copyright law means and what the framers of that law intended. It may be up to a court to interpret the law if DC and the Siegels cannot come to an understanding.

Best, Pat

Kurt wrote:

"If nothing else, Darren, this certainly makes it clear that there's a new era at TCJ. I'd never have expected
that a TCJ editor would be this unaware of what's actually being claimed in a major comics-industry news
story, or be this ready to assume that in the absence of any evidence, the publisher must be right."

Don't worry, Kurt, there won't be a new era at the Journal until the day they kick the dirt over my wizened, cold body.

In point of fact, Darren's post doesn't indicate any change whatsoever: believe me, many previous Journal edfitors have disagreed with specific slants of the magazine and positions I've staked out in editorials. I would think that differiNG voices in the Journal efitorial make-up would be considered a good thing. One of the myths promulgated about the Journal is that there is One Monolithic Company Line that everyone hones to and that everyone must blindly follow der Feuhrer Groth over the cliff. Darren's post disproves this and, as I said, we've had plenty of disagreement among Journalistas here in the office. (If push came to shove and the Journal took an Official Position akin to what we did with the Kirby art affair --as opposed to the unofficial position, which is mine, and which I'll enumerate in due course-- it would be pro-Siegel heirs, notwithstanding my respect for Darren's protests.

I don't think that Darren's position is a result of being grossly unaware of what's being claimed, by the way; I think he has a different opinion based on the facts. But, speaking of facts, I think in your zeal to advocate on behalf of the Siegels, which I admire, you've gotten some facts wrong yourself.

Darren wrote: They were *willing* to take $130.00 for the story. They *willingly* sold the story (sorry, Edmalex, but if
this constitutes theft, I'm a platypus).>>

Kurt replied: Depends on what they sold, and what National took. If there wasn't any more of a contract than that $130
page-rate check, then all National was entitled to was first printing rights -- not all rights in and to the
characters in all media forever. I don't know what S&S signed, but I'm not going to assume that National
covered all the bases with that $130 check ...

S&S sued DC twice, once for Superman (which they lost) and again for Superboyhich they won they lost their first suit claiming ownership of Superman, I think we can logically deduce that the court found that DC's proof of ownership met the legal standard. Right or wrong (and I think more wrong than right) , DC appeared to prove to the court's satisfaction that they stole the work legally.

>> Darren wrote: Subsequently, they were paid HANDSOMELY to work for National Periodicals/DC Comics (I don't have
the numbers in front of me, but it's a damn sight more than I'm being paid -- and in the '40s, at that.).>>

Kurt wrote: And Stephen King gets paid handsomely to write novels, but the size of the check doesn't affect the rights
transferred. As far as I can tell, there were later settlements in which all rights _were_ transferred, but very
likely only after National had assumed all rights without securing them.

I don't know what the basis for this assertion is. Nor do I understand the logic of what is being asserted, come to think of it. How could all rights be transferred only after DC "had assumed all rights without securing them." How could rights be transferred after they had failed to secure them? At any rate, I, again, don't think this is the case.

We are going to move ehaven and earth to get our hands on the original (two) suits S&S filed against DC and, God and Mike dean willing, we'll incldue a solid historical piece in the next update to the story in the Journal. Darren brings up a good point that is almost never mentioned, though: S&S lived like kings throughout a signifciant part of the '40s, making $100,000 a year or so (the equivalent today? $500,000? More?). The money river stopped when they sued DC. And it presumably never started up with such velocity after they'd lost. Still, how did they piss all that money away so that they were reduced to pauperism by the '60s? I don't think this adjusts the moral equation, but it's an interesting part of the story.
>> Darren wrote: DC rewarded S&S by hiring them to continue to write and draw the strip. There's nothing, to the best of my
knowledge, that required them to do this.>>

Kurt wrote: The continued employment was part of the deal in selling them the series in the first place -- they sold an
ongoing feature to a new magazine. Was DC required to do it? If that's what the deal said, yes -- and if so,
DC reneged when they fired them. Was it in the deal? I don't know for sure, but you don't seem to know for
sure either, and are willing to assume that DC made no promises beyond that $130, just as you're willing to
assume that DC specifically and concretely bought all rights in all media now and forever for that $130. Why
do you make only the assumptions that benefit the publisher?

Kurt, you wrote that SD&S' continued employment was part of the deal when they sold Superman to them and, in subsequent reiterations, you preface that with "if." Do you know if it was part of the deal? I never heard that and I think it's counter-intuitive to assume that it was.face it: S&S made not one but a whole series of utterly stupid decisions (including selling Superboy back to DC for a flat fee after they'd won the rights to it, which is inutterably dumb since it repeats the same dumb mistake they made with Superman in the first place!) -- so you're saying they were foolish enough to sell Superman hook, line, and sinker to DC but prescient enough to demand an employment contract?

My guess is that DC gave them a bone by overpaying them for running the Superman factory (where they oversaw their fellow artists taken advantage of by DC via them), a rare bit of noblesse oblige on DC's part that kept S&S happy and got the work done out of house so DC didn't have to worry about it.

My take, unpredictably, is that S&S got reamed and what's playing out is about fucking time -- assuming the heirs get much, which is in doubt as far as I'm concerned. I don't buy the libertarian argument that a deal that someone who "willingly" takes, regardless of economic and social context, is inherently just -- and I care more for justice than legal niceties, especially when the law is intrinsically unjust. If Darren sold a patent to 3M for $300 because every analagous company were just as predatory, swinish, and cheap as GM and because he needed to make the rent that month and GM went on to make millions from it, I'd lobby for Darren to get a percentage.

Aiee. I just typed out an incredibly-long response to Gary, got disconnected and lost it all. Let's see if I can recreate it...

Gary Groth
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kurt wrote:
"If nothing else, Darren, this certainly makes it clear that there's a new era at TCJ. I'd never have expected
that a TCJ editor would be this unaware of what's actually being claimed in a major comics-industry news
story, or be this ready to assume that in the absence of any evidence, the publisher must be right."

>> One of the myths promulgated about the Journal is that there is One Monolithic Company Line that everyone hones to and that everyone must blindly follow der Feuhrer Groth over the cliff. Darren's post disproves this and, as I said, we've had plenty of disagreement among Journalistas here in the office.>>

I wasn't attempting to promulgate that myth -- I've never particularly been an adherent of it, myself, having gotten good reviews from TCJ on Marvel and Image comics -- but rather commenting that Darren's post absolutely disproves such a notion. I mean, I expect Pat isn't convinced, but if anyone else wasn't, this'd do it.

It wasn't so much the idea that a TCJ editor wouldn't say such things because Evil Puppeteer Gary wouldn't let him, but because, well -- a TCJ editor would be about the last person I'd expect to take such a stance. I'd think the job would be self-selecting for a different outlook. So the "new era" I was referring to wasn't the new, not-controlled-by-Groth era, but a sharp difference between this editorial regime and the last one.

>>I don't think that Darren's position is a result of being grossly unaware of what's being claimed, by the way; I think he has a different opinion based on the facts.>>

I think the post to which I was responding implied that the Siegels were claiming they were entitled to massive restitution on past earnings, via the software analogy. If that's not what Darren meant -- and he says it wasn't -- then I think he was very unclear. I'll take his word for it, but I'll stand by the comment as a response to the post as written.

>>But, speaking of facts, I think in your zeal to advocate on behalf of the Siegels, which I admire, you've gotten some facts wrong yourself.>>

Certainly always possible, though I didn't stoop to facts very often...

>>Darren wrote: They were *willing* to take $130.00 for the story. They *willingly* sold the story (sorry, Edmalex, but if this constitutes theft, I'm a platypus).>>
Kurt replied: Depends on what they sold, and what National took. If there wasn't any more of a contract than that $130 page-rate check, then all National was entitled to was first printing rights -- not all rights in and to the characters in all media forever. I don't know what S&S signed, but I'm not going to assume that National covered all the bases with that $130 check

>> S&S sued DC twice, once for Superman (which they lost) and again for Superboyhich they won they lost their first suit claiming ownership of Superman, I think we can logically deduce that the court found that DC's proof of ownership met the legal standard. Right or wrong (and I think more wrong than right) , DC appeared to prove to the court's satisfaction that they stole the work legally.>>

And if a court holds that Marvel owns Blade, then Marvel will have proven ownership to a court's satisfaction. It still won't mean that Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan signed over all rights at the time of creation, since they didn't sign anything.

My argument here isn't that DC never proved to anyone's satisfaction that they had title -- though even you seem to think the decision was in error -- but that we don't know what the totality of what DC offered was, and what S&S accepted. If there was a verbal deal involved, then it's easy to claim it didn't exist, but breaking it would still be a violation of the deal as made.

Note, please, that I'm not claiming there was a verbal component to the deal, any more than I'm claiming there was a written contract with specific clauses -- I'm merely challenging Darren's assumption that there was nothing beyond a $130 check and an all-rights/all-media/forever buyout; we don't know that, either.

>>Kurt wrote: And Stephen King gets paid handsomely to write novels, but the size of the check doesn't affect the rights
transferred. As far as I can tell, there were later settlements in which all rights _were_ transferred, but very
likely only after National had assumed all rights without securing them.

>>I don't know what the basis for this assertion is. Nor do I understand the logic of what is being asserted, come to think of it. How could all rights be transferred only after DC "had assumed all rights without securing them.">>

Let's assume for a second that Jack Kirby co-created the Fantastic Four without a contract specifically transferring his rights in the property to Marvel. Let's further assume that Marvel assumed those rights to themselves, and did things like license Fantastic Four cartoon shows and Colorforms sets. And let's further assume that in a later contract, Marvel had Kirby sign away all rights in the Fantastic Four, including rights Marvel may have already exercised.

If such a thing had happened, that would be a transfer of all rights after a publisher had assumed them without securing them.

In most contract I sign these days, they ask me to agree to a clause that states that if they ever find it necessary to secure _other_ documents that make it clear they own this stuff, I agree ahead of time to sign them. This is intended to cover such an eventuality -- that they were sloppy enough not to secure some rights they later realize they've licensed somewhere without legal permission, so they get me to sign a document after the fact that says they could do that. It's an odd construction, but in an industry that's been historically sloppy about securing rights, the after-the-fact patch is not an unknown occurence.

>>How could rights be transferred after they had failed to secure them?>>

By signing a paper that says, in essence, "I'm not actually contesting whether or not you had those rights when you sold that TV show (or whatever), but by cracky if you didn't have those rights, you've got 'em now, and I won't quibble over it." They come up a lot during movie deals, when the movie company is more of a stickler for making sure those rights are locked down than whoever they're trying to buy them from, so the other party hares off after former employers or freelancers to nail down what was not nailed down before, but was, perhaps, sold on the assumption that it was the company's property.

>> We are going to move ehaven and earth to get our hands on the original (two) suits S&S filed against DC and, God and Mike dean willing, we'll incldue a solid historical piece in the next update to the story in the Journal.>>

Sounds great -- I look forward to reading it.

>> Darren wrote: DC rewarded S&S by hiring them to continue to write and draw the strip. There's nothing, to the best of my
knowledge, that required them to do this.>>
Kurt wrote: The continued employment was part of the deal in selling them the series in the first place -- they sold an
ongoing feature to a new magazine. Was DC required to do it? If that's what the deal said, yes -- and if so,
DC reneged when they fired them. Was it in the deal? I don't know for sure, but you don't seem to know for
sure either, and are willing to assume that DC made no promises beyond that $130, just as you're willing to
assume that DC specifically and concretely bought all rights in all media now and forever for that $130. Why
do you make only the assumptions that benefit the publisher?

>>Kurt, you wrote that SD&S' continued employment was part of the deal when they sold Superman to them and, in subsequent reiterations, you preface that with "if." Do you know if it was part of the deal?>>

No, I don't -- that was _my_ sloppy phrasing. What I was doing was responding to Darren's unsupported assertion that there was no such component to the deal with an equally unsupported assertion in the reverse. I should have at least ended that sentence with a question mark, but got lost in that final clause.

The point is, Darren not knowing of any such aspect doesn't mean it doesn't exist -- not when we know so little about the deal at all. I don't claim there must have been a continued employment proviso; I just challenge his assertion that DC didn't renege on anything merely because they didn't renege on anything he knows about.

>>I never heard that and I think it's counter-intuitive to assume that it was.face it: S&S made not one but a whole series of utterly stupid decisions (including selling Superboy back to DC for a flat fee after they'd won the rights to it, which is inutterably dumb since it repeats the same dumb mistake they made with Superman in the first place!) -- so you're saying they were foolish enough to sell Superman hook, line, and sinker to DC but prescient enough to demand an employment contract?>>

Maybe they were that stupid because they thought they were getting an employment contract -- or at least a promise they could trust.

They created Superman with the intent of it being a continuing comic strip, and never intended it to end after that first 13 pages -- even as a comic book property, it was intended to be an ongoing feature, and in fact was one. So it's not unreasonable to assume that they sold it on the expectation that they'd get to do another Superman tale in ACTION #2, and another in #3, and so on.

Now, what form that expectation took could have ranged from blind hope to a vague promise that "we'll take care of ya" to a firm-but-verbal promise of continued employment to something on paper or some other form; I can't begin to guess. And indeed, they might have been so galactically stupid as to sell 13 pages of comics without even the idea that they'd get to do the next story -- but they did do the next story, and quite a few after that, so it seems that whatever their expectation was based on, it was justified -- albeit temporarily.

>> My guess is that DC gave them a bone by overpaying them for running the Superman factory (where they oversaw their fellow artists taken advantage of by DC via them), a rare bit of noblesse oblige on DC's part that kept S&S happy and got the work done out of house so DC didn't have to worry about it.>>

What you're doing here is assuming that S&S screwed up because it's in character, but assuming that DC was remarkably generous, which isn't in character. You could just as readily assume that S&S did one smart thing in their dealings with DC, and that otherwise DC would have been consistently greedy. Either way, someone acted out of character -- we just don't know which one.

I'm told that S&S's deal on the Superman newspaper strip was amazingly slanted in their favor -- virtually all the money went to them with only a tiny pittance going to DC. If this is the case, then that was one hell of a bone for DC to throw when they could have paid a page rate and kept the lion's share of the money themselves. But they didn't -- they made deals that put hundreds of thousands of dollars into S&S's pockets when, if Darren's assumptions are correct, they had no reason to do so beyond being nice. Arguing that S&S couldn't have had any sort of employment deal because it was out of character doesn't really fly when it depends on DC being just as out of character for the hypothesis to work.

So did DC reward S&S all out of proportion to their obligations? I dunno, maybe. Did S&S sell Superman contingent on the idea that if they could ever sell a comic strip, which was what they wanted in the first place, they could do it on the kind of terms they'd have gotten if they owned the character, and DC agreed because they never imagined such an eventuality would actually happen? I dunno, maybe. Did DC funnel all work on Superman through S&S for a while because they thought it was a great idea to pay S&S high rates instead of hiring S&S's employees to work directly cheaper? Did they funnel all the work through S&S because they'd promised to? I dunno.

Maybe Mike Dean's piece will give us all some more information on the subject. Meanwhile, I challenge Darren's assumptions, not because I know different, but because I don't know enough to believe his assumptions. They're assumptions -- they take the part we know for sure and assume that there's nothing else to the story. I don't see any reason to assume we know everything that went into that deal.

>>My take, unpredictably, is that S&S got reamed and what's playing out is about fucking time -- assuming the heirs get much, which is in doubt as far as I'm concerned.>>

You and I aren't far apart on that, at least.

kurt

Y'know, some of this debate about exactly what the deal was between Siegel & Shuster and DC can be answered by the papers filed by the Siegel heirs--which were available for perusing when Matt Brady's original article appeared on the Another Universe website. (Dunno if they're still there, but I saved them.)

Here's the relevant bit, quoting from the agreement signed by S&S and DC in December, 1937:

"An Agreement of EMPLOYMENT [emphasis mine] executed on or about December 4, 1937, which states in part that 'any new and additional features which the employees [Siegel and Shuster] produce for use in a comic magazine are to be first submitted to the Employer [Detective Comics, Inc.], who reserves the right to accept or reject same within a period of Sixty days.' "

Clearly, somebody--either DC and/or S&S--saw their deal as an employment contract, as well as a sale of a particular already completed work.

Best, Pat

Darren Hick wrote:
>>Do you truly feel that, in the world of computer program publishing,for instance, anyone even considers who did all the actual programming (i.e. writing)? A good deal of the programmers who put together your web browser are likely credited somewhere in the program, but have you ever thought to yourself, "Wow, that Bob Johnson does some nice programming -- I'll have to check out his next work"?<<

Actually, this does happen. John Romero is considered to be a bit of a minor celebrity in the gaming industry because of his work on Doom and Quake. So much so, that he was able to start his own company, based mostly on his reputation as a game designer.

Mind you, this is a horrible example, since he seems to have the attention span of a Rob Liefeld; but there are a growing number of game creators which have fans.

What this says to me is that creators are VERY important in entertainment fields. While no one cares who helped write the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary, people do care about who writes the novels they read. Otherwise, people wouldn't be Michael Crichton fans, they would be mindlessly buying any book published by Knoft.

Pat ONeill
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Here's the relevant bit, quoting from the agreement signed by S&S and DC in December, 1937:
"An Agreement of EMPLOYMENT [emphasis mine] executed on or about December 4, 1937, which states in part that 'any new and additional features which the employees [Siegel and Shuster] produce for use in a comic magazine are to be first submitted to the Employer [Detective Comics, Inc.], who reserves the right to accept or reject same within a period of Sixty days.' "
Clearly, somebody--either DC and/or S&S--saw their deal as an employment contract, as well as a sale of a particular already completed work.>>

Well, that pretty well clinches the idea that there was more to S&S's sale of Superman than $130 and no further obligation. The part quoted here refers to obligations on S&S's part, not DC's, but they're obligations in an ongoing, contractual relationship. Without more actual data, we can't tell for sure what the obligations were on the other side, but it's very hard to imagine there were none...

kurt

I was able to dig up that article with the Siegel interview I mentioned earlier on this thread. The article appeared in the Nov/Dec 1975 issue of COBBLESTONE, and I believe was written by Phil Yeh, from a personal interview. In it, Siegel releases the following letter from National Periodicals Publisher, Jack Liebowitz to Seigel and Shuster dated June 27, 1941:

"Under the terms of our contract you are entitled to a percentage of the net profits accruing from the exploitation of SUPERMAN in channels other than magazines. These figures for the last year show that we lost money, and therefore you are entitled to no royalties. However, in line with our usual generous attitude to you boys, I am enclosing a check for $500 which is in effect a token of feeling."

Besides indicating that S&S had an agreement to get royalties, it should be noted that SUPERMAN began appearing on radio in 1940 and Paramount began the first of 18 SUPERMAN animated cartoons in 1941. Sounds like some early Hollywood accounting going on at DC!

An interesting rumor that I kept hearing while putting the recent SPLASH report together, but that I wasn't able to confirm, was that Jack Liebowitz (the same guy who wrote the above letter) still sits on the Board of Trustees of TIME WARNER and was called in to consult on this new copyright matter, which, if true, kind of adds a LES MISERABLES twist to the whole story.

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Charles Reece wrote:
"Regarding their signing over Superman. (I’m, of course, excluding all of the nasty things that have been
brought up in this thread, which are extraneous to this one point). DC invested a lot more money into the
character, so why shouldn’t they have made more? Do you (or anyone else, for that matter) really believe
Superman would be so recognizable without the marketing abilities of DC?"

You ask, rhetorically, why DC "shouldn't...have made more" than S&S, and then answer it by saying that they had the money needed to properly exploit the character and S&S didn't. But, I don't concede that you should prejudice capital over creativity. On what basis do you believe the investment of capital is worth greater dividends in the end than the original creative artists? In the absence of a concrete philosophical formulation, I'd have to say 50/50 is most fair. Instead of, say, the .00001/99.00009 split that was given.