Consider, if you will, the following scenario. A person buys an ornament for £2 from a charity shop. Later, upon reflection, they decide that they don’t really like it so they put it out in their garden shed. A couple of years later, someone collecting for a jumble sale chaps their door and the ornament is recovered from the shed and freely handed over in order to raise funds to repair some church’s leaky roof.

Ten years later, the first person is watching ANTIQUES ROADSHOW and sees “their” ornament declared as being worth £20,000. Do they have a moral or legal claim on any of that money if the current owner decides to sell?

Now consider this. Someone asks an artist to paint a picture of their house and gardens. He charges them £300 and is extremely pleased at the amount he has secured for himself. Five years later, a visitor to the purchaser’s house is so enamoured of the painting that he offers them £5,000 for it. Over the years, it changes hands for increased amounts until it is worth £50,000. Does the artist have any moral or legal claim on any of the money it has changed hands for over the years?

The answer is surely “no” – isn’t it?

So – what’s the difference between those two examples and what happened to SIEGEL and SCHUSTER over SUPERMAN, or JACK KIRBY and the many characters he created or co-created for MARVEL or DC COMICS? Or the work LEO BAXENDALE (or any artist you care to name) did for D.C. THOMSON or FLEETWAY/IPC? I would suggest none at all. If you consent to sell something outright for an agreed fee, then it’s really nothing to do with you what the purchaser does with his purchase or how much he profits from it in the years to come. If you buy a house for £80,000 and then sell it for £100,000, the previous owner (even if he built the house) is neither legally nor morally entitled to a share of your profit. And, back in the day, that’s the way it was done in the world of comics.


Which is not to say that I have anything against present-day creators’ rights, profit sharing, copyright ownership, return of artwork, or anything like that – because that’s the way things are done nowadays. However, back in the 1930s (until relatively recently – late ’70s, early ’80s), comics were – in the main – just a job to the writers and artists working on them, and it was the publishers who were taking the financial risk in launching a new comicbook – so why shouldn’t their share of the profits proportionately reflect that risk? When a publisher bought a character, they bought it outright – if it was a success, they made money, if it was a failure, they didn’t. It’s a safe bet that there were a lot more failures than successes in those days. That was just the way the cookie crumbled.

Anyone got any thoughts on the matter? Let’s hear them.

The negative effects of these deals on creators is one thing, but it is worth considering that the delay of these works entering the public domain is a cultural disaster. After a reasonable amount of time these creations were intended by the founding fathers to become part of our culture for anyone to use without fear of penalty. Instead you might get a cease-and-desist for posting a family video on YouTube that shows you singing the Happy Birthday song (copyright owned by Warner-Chappell).

Jamie said—

“Donenfeld and Liebowitz likely knew they wouldn’t be able to snow Jerry a 2nd time and simply elected to wait until he was drafted and start publishing it without paying him anything.”
_____

I don’t know if ’simply elected to wait until he was drafted’ are the correct words, only because they probably wouldn’t have known he was going to be drafted, but other than that minor quibble, I agree.

- Promised Jerry he and Shuster they would share the wealth and their rights would be looked after. They clearly shared very little of the wealth and they were reminded that DC owned the character and they had no rights when they wanted to negotiate a much better deal for the Superman newspaper strip.

- Took away the Superman shop when Siegel was in serving during WW2.

- Refuse to allow them to restart the shop, thereby reducing their income.

- Turned down Superboy, waited until Siegel was in the Army and then began publishing him. I believe Siegel knew his chances at getting a fair deal for Superman was slim once the real nature of the DC owners was revealed to him. I’m sure he was planning on negotiating a *much* better contract for Superboy. Donenfeld and Liebowitz likely knew they wouldn’t be able to snow Jerry a 2nd time and simply elected to wait until he was drafted and start publishing it without paying him anything. They stuck Superboy in an anthology title and kept him there probably to help mitigate any losses by arguing Superboy was only a part of the reason for the title’s profits. When the case was settled Superboy got his own title.

- Rather than work out a fair deal with Siegel and Shuster, let things go until the point the two felt they had to sue DC. They did the typical drag them out until they can’t afford to pay their lawyers anymore tactic which forced them to settle for a fraction of the amount Superboy was worth.

- Removed Siegel and Shusters byline from any and all Superman products. Even when somebody did put it on, they made sure to take it off again.

- In the 50s Joe Shuster was spotted doing delivery work in shabby clothes outside of DC’s building. DC asked him come in the next day, they gave him $100 for an overcoat to hide the shabby clothes and told him to never come to their building again.

- God knows what Wiesinger put him through during the 50s when he began writing for DC again. To be fair Wiesinger was shitty to pretty much all the freelancers.

- During the 60/70s lawsuit over the 28 year copyright renewal they suggested to Siegel that if he dropped his case they would negotiate a fair settlement. He dropped his case and then there was no settlement offer from DC.

- Knew full well that the creators were extremely poor. Shuster was legally blind, living on welfare and supported in part by his brother. Siegel at one point had to get low paying 9-5 jobs (I’ve heard mail clerk and security guard) but still didn’t care even though they were multi-millionaires.

- When Robinson and Adams were doing the negotiations for Siegel and Shuster the last major sticking point was creator credits. It was something *somebody* at DC really did not want the creators to get, but they did eventually get it. I strongly suspect if it were not for Jay Emmett, Warner Brothers Executive Vice President who cared more about the Superman movie going through with no negative PR than keeping Siegel and Shuster poor there wouldn’t have been any deal.

And there may or may not have been some dickish behaviour going on behind the scenes over the last 9 years or so while this current lawsuit is ongoing.

Well, Jamie did give his overview on the characters of Donenfeld and Liebowitz in his post above. In most of the accounts of the era, Donenfeld and Liebowitz were KNOWN to be hard-nosed/unscrupulous publishers. Siegel is KNOWN to have been promised the moon and the stars which he, yes foolishly, never got in writing. Donenfeld was a bootlegger and pornographer who lied about going to business school.

So I don’t really get what your question was. Siegel and Shuster were naive young dreamers who got taken advantage of over and over and over, and never really had good advice from anyone who was trustworthy until the end of their lives. Donenfeld and Leibowitz were opportunistic publishers who had no respect for the medium they pioneered. We’re still paying the price for their contempt.

So, you can say S&S got what they deserved. Did they deserve more than $130 for creating the greatest superhero of all times? Legally, no. Ethically? Well, that’s where it’s a judgment call.

Overall, I prefer not to take the side of people like Donenfeld.

Jonathan, I have to agree with “bad wolf” above. Maybe reading Jamie Coville’s post or some of the links would enlighten you more than this whole “me am unfrozen caveman Objectivist…no understand your ‘linkage’” business. When you have had time to read the relevant material and feel qualified to have an opinion, please come back.

You, sir, will never be “enlightened.”

It seems that I’ll have to do my own research to answer the questions that I have, and when I have the time I will indeed check out the links provided, but I just don’t have that much time during my work day sadly. The problem I had was that no one could explain to me what this guy (or guys) did to S&S that was so unethical; it was merely stated “they got screwed.” All I know is they signed a contract, but I don’t know any of the details surrounding it which is ultimately what will fill in this picture.

Jamie –

I don’t think your analogy really helps me in this instance. I could very well understand that as a possible scenario, but it doesn’t tell me what Mr. Donenfield did that makes him similar to this aforementioned vacuum cleaner salesman. What I need here to understand the situation is what he said and did to Mr. Siegel and Mr. Schuster that makes him akin to the door-to-door pest. I appreciate the effort, but it’s the details that are being left out of the story that I now need to seek out on my own to figure out how I feel about the situation and how it went down.

I thought I could get a synopsis of what happened and understand this debate, but it seems that it’s much murkier and much harder to understand than I had previously estimated. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some reliable sources to enlighten me.

– Jonathan

Let’s not go overboard here, Heidi. This is purely a question of copyright extension, and who gets the extended period – the original creator or the later purchaser. There are perfectly good logical reasons for giving it to the original creator, as otherwise the purchaser gets a windfall by acquiring an extended copyright period that he never paid for.

But as I understand it, it’s purely and simply a question of whether the Siegels can tick all the boxes and whether they jumped through all the procedural hoops. It makes no difference whether the original deal was good or bad. It may well be that in this particular case, the law has redressed an injustice in the original deal, but that’s just coincidence.