Culture Shock 08.20.09: Copyright laws are Superman's true Kryptonite

According to his public relations handlers, Superman is supposed to fight a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. But the only battle Superman is fighting nowadays is in court.

The latest skirmish went public last week with the news that Warner Bros., owner of DC Comics, which, in turn, owns Superman, had lost some of its rights to the character. The heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel gained rights to key elements of the Man of Steel's mythos, including Lois Lane, Krypton, his costume design, The Daily Planet and his alter-ego, Clark Kent.

Basically, they got everything that Siegel and his partner, Joe Shuster, came up with before the two sold their Superman copyright to National Publications, the company that would eventually become DC Comics.

Warner Bros. retained elements that came later, including Lex Luthor, the term "Kryptonite" and Superman's ability to fly. Originally, as you'll recall, Superman merely could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Flying takes practice.

Putting the best possible spin on the situation, Warner Bros. issued a statement: "Warner and DC Comics are pleased that the court has affirmed that the vast majority of key elements associated with the Superman character that were developed after Action Comics No. 1 are not part of the copyrights that the plaintiffs have recaptured and therefore remain solely owned by DC Comics."

But all of that may not mean a lot as long as ownership of Superman himself is still an issue.

These legal wranglings have been going on for years — and, in some cases, decades. Siegel and Shuster sold Superman for a string of beads and soon regretted it. They spent years trying to get more money out of DC Comics, eventually having to settle for modest pensions. Unlike Bob Kane, Batman's creator of record, Superman's dads didn't have a lawyer when they sold the rights to their creation. Kane died wealthy. Siegel and Shuster did not.

The latest battle stems from a change in law allowing original copyright holders, or their heirs, to reclaim copyrights transferred before 1978. Siegel's widow and their daughter filed a copyright termination notice 10 years ago, and the fight has been raging, more or less, ever since.

As it currently stands, Warner Bros. and DC will lose their rights to Superman in their entirety in 2013, putting pressure on Warner to get a new Superman movie into development by 2011. Judge Stephen Larson ruled last month that if a new film isn't in the works by then, Siegel's heirs can sue for damages.

Warner's problems are the result of Superman still being under copyright in the first place, which, ironically, is partly Warner's fault. The copyright on Superman, who was created in 1938, should have run out years ago. But media giants like Warner and Disney have successfully lobbied Congress for repeated extensions, without which Superman, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and other characters created in the 1930s would already have lapsed into the public domain.

In Disney's case, the hypocrisy is particularly rank. The Disney empire is built on public-domain characters, from Snow White to the Little Mermaid.

In any event, Warner Bros. will eventually pay whatever it takes to make Siegel's heirs go away, leaving Superman in Warner's stable of marketable intellectual property. Then Warner and Disney will lobby for — and probably get — more copyright extensions from Congress.

And the pubic, which should own Superman by now, will remain forgotten in the legal shenanigans.

‘The League’ faces its greatest threat: copyright

After nearly a year of delays, the third installment of Alan Moore and illustrator Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” has finally arrived on bookstore shelves.

For those of you just coming in, the first two volumes followed a team of Victorian-era “superheroes” brought together by the British government to fight such dastardly evildoers as Dr. Fu Manchu and Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, as well as a Martian invasion.

Hollywood turned the first volume into a dreadful movie, but the less said about that, the better.

Picking up about 60 years after the second volume, the third installment, “The Black Dossier,” follows rejuvenated League members Mina Murray (from “Dracula”) and Allan Quatermain as they sneak into 1950s England to steal a top-secret history of the League’s various incarnations throughout the years.

Whereas the first two volumes feature numerous out-of-copyright characters drawn from Victorian literature — notably, in addition to Murray and Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Capt. Nemo and Mr. Hyde — “The Black Dossier” includes thinly veiled versions of characters still owned by various corporations and estates.

Some are fairly obscure, especially if, unlike Moore, you didn’t grow up watching British television and reading British adventure magazines. Others, like James Bond and Emma Peel (“The Avengers”), while not named as such, are impossible to miss. And, it’s putting it mildly to say this is probably the most unflattering portrayal you’ll ever see of Ian Fleming’s bruising, boozing, womanizing super spy.

It’s the presence of Bond and other fairly recently literary, film and TV characters that has gotten this installment into trouble. DC Comics refuses to publish it outside the U.S. because of differences in international copyright laws — not to mention fear of litigious copyright lawyers. And that has led to the most recent dust-up in Moore’s long-running feud with DC. So, Moore is taking his next volume of “The League,” scheduled for release next year, to Top Shelf Productions.

Of course, if copyright law had been as expansive 100 years ago as it is today, a series like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” wouldn’t have been possible at all, and writers like Moore wouldn’t be able to draw upon our shared literary heritage in order to tell new stories.

Whenever the copyright term on characters like Mickey Mouse and Superman comes close to running out, companies like Disney and Time Warner, which owns DC Comics, rush to Congress for an extension. Characters and works that should enter the public domain — long after their creators have died — remain under copyright, where the rest of us can’t touch them.

A century from now, a future Alan Moore won’t have the option of creating his own league composed of, for example, Jack Ryan, Anita Blake and Hannibal Lecter. That will be a major loss for popular culture. Meanwhile, Moore is far from the only author to find new stories for old characters.

British novelist Kim Newman draws upon Sherlock Holmes and Victorian novels like “Dracula” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau” in his 1992 novel “Anno Dracula” and its sequels. And no one gets more miles from Victorian literature and early 20th century pulp magazines than science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer.

Through numerous books and short stories, Farmer has crafted a fictional universe that includes Tarzan, Doc Savage and, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Everyone loves Sherlock.

But unless Congress finally says no to Disney and the rest, the worlds of Moore, Newman and Farmer may be the last in which fictional characters from all over can get together for one big literary party.

Culture Shock 02.22.07: Big media is watching your iPod

If you think you really own the songs you purchase and download from digital retailers like iTunes, think again.

The same goes for movies and episodes of your favorite television shows.

When you buy a compact disc or DVD, you can take it with you wherever you go, let friends borrow it and play it on any CD or DVD player. But you can't necessarily do that with the digital music and movies you buy online. The reason for that is something called Digital Rights Management.

DRM encoding embedded into songs you buy from iTunes, for example, prevents you from playing the songs on anything other than Apple's iPod or iTunes computer software.

When you buy a CD or DVD, a store clerk doesn't follow you home to see that you use it properly. But, in effect, that's what happens when you purchase digital media online. DRM is like Big Brother, always looking over your shoulder to make sure you don't use the product — for which you paid good money — in some way that the big music publishers and movie studios don't like.

DRM restrictions on TV shows are even worse. With some playback devices, downloaded episodes are automatically deleted or rendered unplayable after a few days whether you've watched them or not.

Not that DRM actually works, mind you. Hackers are always finding ways around it, in spite of legislation that makes doing so illegal. And even the most unsophisticated computer user can burn iTunes songs onto a CD and then copy them right back onto his computer as plain old MP3 files free of DRM. But DRM is an inconvenience, and it is an insult to consumers, who are treated like criminals.

The U.S. Congress, prodded by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, criminalizing the production and distribution of technology designed to circumvent DRM. As science-fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow has written, the main effect of the law hasn't been to protect copyrighted material but to stifle new media technologies.

"DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition," Doctorow has written. He likens it the MPAA's initial opposition to VCRs — before, of course, the movie industry started making more money from home video than in theaters.

If the entertainment industry had gotten its way, VCRs would have been illegal. Now, it is getting its way, and digital technology is suffering for it.

But the battle lines against DRM are finally being drawn, spurred, in part, by an anti-DRM broadside from an unlikely source — Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Earlier this month, Jobs wrote an open letter encouraging the largest music publishers to abandon DRM.

"Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM ... ?" Jobs wrote. "The simplest answer is because DRMs have never worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

Jobs may have an ulterior motive. European regulators want to force Apple to license its DRM technology to other companies, which would lead to consumers being able to play iTunes music on players other than Apple's market-leading iPod. For Jobs, mutual disarmament is a far better prospect that the unilateral disarmament Europe could force upon him.

But whatever his motivation, Jobs has reopened a debate that the big media empires had hoped to end in 1998. Consumers have little more to lose and their consumer sovereignty to regain.