Corona | Coming Attractions

Last Friday Marvel Worldwide filed a lawsuit in New York City federal court defending its right to continue to use and hold the copyrights to characters created by Jack Kirby, artist and co-creator of many well-known comic book superheroes . The suit alleges that the characters and artwork that Kirby created for Marvel between the years 1958 to 1963 were drawn for hire and as such Kirby and his estate are not entitled to ownership of the intellectual property.

Kirby passed away in 1994 at the age of 73. In September 2009 the four children of Kirby filed 45 "notices of termination" to such companies as Paramount Pictures (distributors of the upcoming movies Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, all of which contain characters created by the artist), Universal Pictures (which presently owns the movie rights to The Incredible Hulk), 20th Century Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four), The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Entertainment. In the Kirby documents the heirs state their intentions to regain copyright of the characters their father created when, after 56 years from the first publication of the property, the copyright can be reclaimed by the original creator or their beneficiaries. The Kirby documents were filed two weeks after Disney announced its intention to purchase Marvel in a deal worth $4 billion dollars.

Shortly after Kirby's family announced their intentions a representative for The Walt Disney Company stated that these filings would not affect the company's acquisition of Marvel. "Everything about Kirby's relationship with Marvel shows that his contributions were works made for hire and that all the copyright interests in them belong to Marvel," stated Disney attorney John Turitzin.

This aggressive new move by Disney could be seen as a positioning of the company to vigorously defend its ownership of all the 8,000+ characters it acquired when Disney purchased Marvel. Conceivably, if the judge ruled in favor of Kirby's estate the doors could be opened for other creators and their surviving families to get back the copyright to more Marvel characters, effectively emptying Disney of the reason why it paid so much to own Marvel in the first place.