Siegel Heirs Regain Superman Rights

Good news for the little guy: Seventy years after Superman's creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, famously gave up their rights to the character for $130, a federal judge has ruled that Siegel's heirs are entitled to a share of the domestic copyright, as reported in The New York Times.

That's bad enough news for Time Warner, which has had sole control over Superman since it swallowed up DC Comics in 1969. But Siegel's share in rights to the Superman character are restored as of 1999, which opens up the possibility, to be resolved at trial, that back royalties are owed for revenues gained throughout the Superman franchise for the last nine years – possibly including Superman Returns (2006), which grossed $200 million at the U.S. box office. (Time Warner's international rights are unmolested.)

The pending litigation and appeals may hopelessly ensnarl ongoing Superman projects, from Smallville to the forthcoming Justice League films, with rights and licensing issues, including issues involving multimedia (how closely the film and DVD rights are linked to the print copyright) and related characters (a separate case involves rights to Superboy, and whether they pertain to Smallville). The case specifically involves the copyright to the contents of Action Comics #1, where Superman was first introduced; whether the reverted rights apply to later evolutions of the Superman mythology not included in that issue is another open question.

Meanwhile the ruling, resolving a case brought by Siegel's wife and daughter, also opens up the possibility of a similar reversion of rights to Shuster's estate as well, beginning in 2013.

DC comics tried over the years to ensure Siegel and Shuster stayed out of the picture in return for relatively small annual annuities ($20,000 a year starting in the 1970s, later upped to $30,000 – small change for the fantastically lucrative franchise, as Siegel himself, who died in 1996, bitterly observed). It's long after the fact, and still to be fought tooth and nail and paragraph by paragraph, but there's something immensely gratifying in the prospect of the huge, monolithic corporation that controls one of our dream universes being forced to share with the guy with the typewriter who made their colossal profits possible.