Disney sues to keep complete rights to Marvel characters

[LOS ANGELES] Moving to defend its Marvel superhero franchises, the Walt Disney on Friday filed a flurry of lawsuits seeking to invalidate copyright termination notices served by artists and illustrators involved with marquee characters like Iron Man, Spider-Man and Thor.

Daniel M. Petrocelli, a high-powered Los Angeles litigator, filed the complaints on Disney's behalf in federal courts in New York and California.

The dispute started in the spring when a prominent intellectual property lawyer, Marc Toberoff, served Marvel Entertainment, which is owned by Disney, with notices of copyright termination on behalf of five clients. They include Lawrence D. Lieber, 89, a comics writer and artist known for his 1960s-era contributions to bedrock Marvel characters.

Mr Toberoff's other clients are the estates of comics illustrators Steve Ditko and Don Heck, and heirs of writers Don Rico and Gene Colan. They are seeking to reclaim rights related to the Marvel characters they had a hand in creating, including Doctor Strange, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Captain Marvel, Falcon, Blade and the Wizard - several of which have become star revenue generators for Disney.

The reclamation attempts stem from a provision of copyright law that, under certain conditions, allows authors or their heirs to regain ownership of a product after a given number of years.

Such efforts turn on whether authors worked as hired hands or produced the material on their own and then sold it to publishers.

The Copyright Revision Act of 1976, which opened the door to termination attempts, bans termination for people who delivered work at the "instance and expense" of an employer.

"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," Mr Petrocelli said by phone.

Mr Toberoff disagrees. "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 car fare out of their basements."

If successful, Mr Toberoff's clients would receive a portion of profits from new works based on any of the copyrighted material.

THE NEW YORK TIMES