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Marvel, which is owned by the Disney corporation, is attempting to file a lawsuit against the estates of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Larry Lieber, and other former Marvel comics artists who created some of their flagship characters like Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and The Avengers.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, these lawsuits were sparked in August after the Steve Ditko estate, in particular, demanded the termination of Ditko’s created character Spider-Man. Under the termination provisions of copyright law, authors or their estate can reclaim their characters from the IP holder after a set period of time. According to the termination, Marvel would only own the character up until 2023 upon which the rights would be co-owned by Ditko.
Disney in turn is seeking to invalidate these copyright termination notices, claiming that they own the full right to these characters over their original creators due to the business method used when creating them in the 1960s.
The crux for Disney’s litigation argument lies in how early Marvel characters like Spider-Man and The Avengers were made under the “Marvel Method”. This refers to how early Marvel comics were made under a loose collaborative effort where the artist would only be given a general plot outline of what they were drawing without the actual script from the writer. Editors would then come in and finalize what panels and script lines would make it into the comic. Artists were usually contracted to be paid by the page.
Because of this, Disney and Marvel can argue that creators were only one part of a collaborative effort to create the character alongside Marvel-owned resources and personnel. Therefore they cannot claim sole ownership of the character even if they came up with the design, backstory, or other elements of lore.
Dan Petrocelli, a representative of Disney said to The New York Times specifically about the lawsuit with Stan Lee brother and Hulk creator Larry Liber:
“Since these were works made for hire and thus owned by Marvel, we filed these lawsuits to confirm that the termination notices are invalid and of no legal effect,”
“Marvel assigned Lieber stories to write, had the right to exercise control over Lieber’s contributions and paid Lieber a per-page rate for his contributions.” Those conditions render his contributions “work made for hire, to which the Copyright Act’s provisions do not apply,”
It was this reasoning that allowed Marvel to win a similar lawsuit with the creator of Ghost Rider in 2013.
The artist estates are being represented by Marc Toberoff who has similar previous experience working for the estates of Superman creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster for copyright termination against DC Comics and Jack Kirby for his creations like the X-Men with Marvel. He was unsuccessful in these cases.
In an email to the New York Times, Toberoff says
“At the time all these characters were created, their material was definitely not ‘work made for hire’ under the law,” he said in an email in response to Disney’s filings. “These guys were all freelancers or independent contractors, working piecemeal for carfare out of their basements.” Hence, not “traditional, full-time employees,”
“At the core of these cases is an anachronistic and highly criticized interpretation of ‘work-made-for-hire,’”
If Marvel loses the lawsuit they will be forced to share the characters with the estates of their creators and potentially lose billions in having to pay for the use of copyrighted characters.
