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The heirs to Superman co-creator Joe Shuster will not be getting back some of the rights to the hero next year as they wanted. A judge said today that an agreement the estate signed 20 years ago with DC Comics rules out any effort by his heirs to terminate the copyright granted to the Warner Bros-owned company. The order granting partial summary judgment (read it here) comes in response to a motion from DC Comics. “The Court finds that the 1992 Agreement, which represented the Shuster heirs’ opportunity to renegotiate the prior grants of Joe Shuster’s copyrights, superseded and replaced all prior grants of the Superman copyrights. The 1992 Agreement thus represents the parties’ operative agreement and, as a post-1978 grant, it is not subject to termination,” wrote District judge Otis Wright III today. DC’s motion is based on their 2010 claim to stop the Shuster heirs taking back rights to some early Superman works on October 26, 2013. In 2008, the estate of the other Superman co-creator, Jerry Siegel recaptured half of the original Superman rights through the courts. ”The order for the most part is the tentative order issued over six weeks ago before oral argument. We respectfully disagree with its factual and legal conclusions, and it is surprising given that the Judge appeared to emphatically agree with our position at the actual summary judgment hearing,” says defendants’ lawyer Marc Toberoff. Warner Bros had no comment on the order today.
Related: Superman Heirs And Warner Bros Attorneys Swap More Nasty Allegations In Legal Battle
As all this has been going on, WB have been preparing their Zack Synder-directed Superman reboot Man Of Steel, which is scheduled to fly on the big screen next summer.
Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.
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Already a heartbreaking headline. If the WB won this court case I will not be spending my hard earned coin to watch their flicks anymore. Will wait for Netflix I suppose.
Maybe I won’t make much of a dent by myself obviously, but it’s my way of responding to their pathetic and illigel behavior in this case!
Guess you didn’t read the whole story? they didn’t win because A judge said today that an agreement the estate signed 20 years ago with DC Comics so theres nothing unfair about nthis !!!
Hooray for corporations!
They are people too.
Well, I’m glad that’s over and we’ll never, ever hear anything about this again. Ever. Ever.
Actually, they are appealing
Yay. The law actually won. Look, the estate made a bad deal back in the day. The courts can’t undo a valid contract just because one side decides it isn’t fair years later.
JK Rowling sold the movie rights to HP for a song. She did very well, but it was a mere fraction of what they were worth. She sold the movie rights before HP became a big hit. But, when she sold the rights, she was making out like a bandit. It was a bad deal for WB. They bought the movie rights to a seven book series that was on book 2, and was virtually unknown in the US.
Plus, what about all the properties studios buy that turn out to be worthless? Should they get the money back from the writer? No. WB made a good deal for themselves. Good for them.
WB gave Rowling a lot of extra money over the years they kept rewarding her after every book and every movie with more money. They should do the same thing with the Superman heirs. They have spent $35 million in legal fees according to Nikki’s last article about this. That is disgraceful. They should have been willing to give that money to the Shusters and Seigels instead of to lawyers.
If Siegel and Shuster were still alive, I would agree with you that WB should give them some money. But the heirs deserve zero dollars from WB. They had no part in the creation of Superman and are just looking for an easy way to get rich without having to create anything.
Warners cheated Joe and Jerry when they were alive. WB should have given them both a couple million bucks long before they died. Their families were denied an inheritance that Joe and Jerry wanted to leave to their wives and kids. That’s why this is so criminal. Starting in 1978 when they made the first and best Superman movie and ever since then Warners decided they didn’t owe Joe and Jerry any money at all. They used the 1936 “work for hire” agreement they signed with the forerunner of DC to deny the creators equitable profit participation.
Jerry & Joe got pensions and “Considerations” till they day they died, and the estates continued to receive the same.
DC was about to give Jerry’s Estate a $10 Million plus deal before Toberoff stepped in,over a decade ago.
Keep in mind that DC is holding the promised and continued royalties due Siegel’s estate in Escrow while all this is happening.
Fashionable as it is to assume the companies are the evil ones, plaintiff attorney Marc Toberoff is a vile bottom feeder of the worst sort. He cares nothing for or about his clients, only the almighty dollar.
I’m trying to figure out what rights the heirs should have to anything. Superman has been overseen by DC and Warner Bros since it’s inception. It’s had a movie serial, 5 movies, 3 live action tv shows and a few animated shows and movies, in addition to several monthly comics and some novels as well. All content controlled and paid for by Warner Bros.
Why should the heirs, who have done absolutely nothing but be born into the right family, have any kinds of rights to something they did not create and had no role in financially or creatively continuing?
“Entitled” Using the voice control on my phone doh! Lol
This is very sad. The original deal between National Comics and Siegel & Shuster was suspect at best. Then DC blacklisted both men from the comics industry for the majority of their careers and they, and their families, were destitute. Every time they were able to negotiate something with the companies who bought the old National, they took pennies on the dollar because they were literally starving.
I’m not saying a ruling for the Siegel heirs would have been the best law, but Warners really ought to have tried to help them out a little financially. I mean, it’s not like anyone working in corporate at Warners has ever had to go hungry.
so these people sued WB and now you want WB to help THEM out? how does that make sense?
if I sued you for a dumb reason and spent a lot on lawyers, would you help me out?
Yeah, but would it have killed WB to have settled with the MS-dx’d heir and not crushed her instead??
Throw her a bone FFS. WB can more than afford it. Acknowledge the DNA of who authored this gravy train.
Winners & losers: it’s so last … paradigm.
Until that slimy attorney got involved, DC was prepared to do a much more lucrative profit sharing deal with the estates.
But Toberoff has a production company and promised the heirs that he would secure the rights to Superman and then he’d get the exclusive rights to make a Superman movie, fully sharing the profits with them instead of having to go through WB.
The Siegel and Shuster estates got greedy and enticed by this lawyer. And DC had every right to challenge the attempt by Shuster’s family to reclaim their half of the rights, especially since the law does state that any copyright deal after 1978 is exempt. The Shuster heirs signed it all away in 1992, creating a new post-1978 deal that means it would be against copyright law for them to reclaim the copyright.
Even if they had, the copyright is just for Action Comics #1. No Lex Luthor. No Brainiac. No krytonite. No Jimmy Olsen. All of those things were created later and are owned fully by DC.
I think there is some confusion here with regards to this story. There are two creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. The estates of both parties have independently attempted to exercise their right to regain their halves of the copyright from Warner Brothers. A judge has already awarded (well over 10 years ago) Siegel’s half of the copyright to his estate, but Warner Brothers has continued to litigate against that estate to prevent them from exercising their half of the copyright. That is what the previous article was about.
Technically, Warner Brothers and DC Comics have continued to use Superman because the Schuster’s half of the copyright is still assigned to them and would not revert back to his estate until, I believe, 2013 (based upon when the Schuster estate gave notice of their copyright claim). This new ruling effectively says that the Schuster estate entered into a binding agreement with Warner Brothers/DC Comics prior to attempting to regain the copyright that supersedes their copyright claim. This new ruling is separate from the legal claims of the Siegel estate, which apparently did not enter into a similar agreement.
For those who suggest that a deal is a deal, it certainly is legally binding. It is also true that the law allows you or your heirs to reclaim the copyright after a certain time, which was written into the law to give creators an opportunity to regain copyright when the original deals may have been exploitive, as in the Superman case.
And this only applies to situations where a creator creates something independently and then sells it to another entity. Creations made under the direct employment of a business are considered work for hire, and copyright permanently remains with the business.
The fascinating thing about this (and this is a really fascinating legal case) is that both the Siegel and Schuster estates can only possibly reclaim what they originally sold to DC Comics. Many of the additions and changes to Superman over the years (including the familiar S shield and many of the family of characters, the ability to fly, heat vision, etc.) were developed by DC, and the estates aren’t entitled to that.
They should have taken the deal that Ari Emanuel offered them of $10 million upfront and then half of the revenue and he would have taken care of the case. Now, no $10 million .
They wrote a book on how they just destroyed the writers. The Complete History- The Life and Times of the Man of Steel (Paperback)
Les Daniels, Chip Kidd
This didn’t surprise me as I had a feeling the Shuster estate was not going to get their half. Besides the 1992 agreement, Joe Shuster had no direct heirs but rather collateral heirs such as his nephew. Basically, it’s 50-50 between DC/WB and the Siegel family, but DC/WB have the edge in owning the trademarks that are separate from copyrights. This is a major victory for DC and WB. A great day for Superman fans.
The heirs definitely were not left penniless like some would have you believe….
“In Wright’s ruling, he noted that DC has paid the Siegel and Shuster families more than $4 million since 1975, not counting medical benefits and bonuses.”
^ in today’s dollars
Plus, they would have received the standard reprint royalty for the material they worked on when it was reprinted.
Something people forget, DC had no reprint royalty clause in their contracts till the mid-1970′s. DC has extended royalty payments to all creative talent, or known heirs – so when you pick up an older work that has been reprinted, you know DC is being fair about that.
Love how the armchair lawyers here are viewing a contract signed in the 1930s by a couple of kids through a politically-correct, 2012 prism. “Work for hire” was a beast. $1500 upfront back then was like $20,000 today. You took the money and kept your mouth shut. The bosses had all the power. You spoke out, you stopped working. 10,000 other guys were right behind you if you made trouble. There were no creator’s rights. Hopefully this verdict will settle the matter, but I doubt it.
All DC/National paid them was $130 which based on the length of the pasted-up from pre-existing,pre-DC/National newspaper strips was a $10 per page page rate. (Plus the cover of Action #1)
SUPERMAN was NOT work-for-hire, Jerry & Joe had worked up several weeks of newspaper daily strip continuities – those were re-cut and pasted up into comic book format for Action #1.
Amazing how many people love to root for Goliath.
If that tidbit about Ari Emanuel is true, though, they should have taken that deal.
Justice has prevailed, finally