Marvel wins rights to superheroes

SPIDER-MAN and his counterparts will remain with Marvel after an ownership claim by the children of the artist who helped create them was rejected.

SPIDER-MAN and his counterparts will remain with Marvel after an ownership claim by the children of the artist who helped create them was rejected.

The family of artist Jack Kirby, who died in 1994 and whose work spanned more than half a century, had wanted to terminate Marvel's copyrights from 2014 through 2019 to comics published from 1958 to 1963.

Marvel Worldwide sued in January 2010 to prevent it, leading US District Judge Colleen McMahon in July 2011 to conclude the work was done "for hire", a legal term that rendered the heirs' claims invalid.

The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Thursday agreed with the decision, saying that when "Kirby sat down to draw, then, it was not in the hope that Marvel or some other publisher might one day be interested enough in them to buy, but with the expectation... that Marvel would pay him".

It added: "Kirby's completed pencil drawings, moreover, were generally not free-standing creative works, marketable to any publisher as a finished or nearly finished product. They build on pre-existing titles and themes that Marvel had expended resources to establish - and in which Marvel held rights - and they required both creative contributions and production work that Marvel supplied. That the works are now valuable is therefore in substantial part a function of Marvel's expenditures over and above the flat rate it paid Kirby for his drawings."

Other comics in the case included The Mighty Thor, The X-Men, The Avengers, Ant-Man, Nick Fury and The Rawhide Kid.