Saturday, March 29, 2008

Interesting Superman News

http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/03/28/siegel-heirs-awarded-action-comics-1-copyright/

The essentials: due to a kind of wonky law, the heirs of Jerry Siegel now own the copyright to Action Comics #1. The costume, the idea, etc.... Now, I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail here - the information is provided above, for your viewing pleasure. This is important information, however - both for comics fans, and for fans of the VS System game. If you just go to www.newsarama.com, they also have on the front page a brief rundown of just what the ruling could mean.

So, I'm curious: what do you all think of this news? It's potentially enormous.

Personally? Well, it's hard to side with the big corporations, but I feel that their pretty much in the right, here. The people being awarded the copyright had nothing to do with the creation of the character - and, more importantly, the copyright was sold legitimately. DC has done all the work in the last 80 years, marketing the character, making him a recognizable figure all the world over. Would the Siegel heirs be willing to repay the 130$ DC bought Superman for, had the character been a flop? I think not. That's simplifying things, of course, but that's my gut reaction.

Obviously, I'll be following this pretty closely. If DC loses Superman, things will be bad for them - real bad. The potential for the Siegel heirs to market Superman out to other companies is also dangerous to the continuation of DC. Not to mention the fact that VS may find that it will have a far harder time making Superman or Team Superman cards...

No comments: