Jack Kirby's family seeks rights to characters.

[Vault]

Source: Coming Soon

Coming Soon reports that the estate of Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, The Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Avengers, Iron Man, Hulk, The Silver Surfer and Thor has sent notices terminating copyright to publishers Marvel and Disney, as well as Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, which have made movies and TV shows based on characters he created or co-created.

The notices expressed an intent to regain copyrights to some of Mr. Kirby’s creations as early as 2014, according to a statement disclosed on Sunday by Toberoff & Associates, a law firm in Los Angeles that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of one of the character’s creators, Jerome Siegel.

The likelihood is that, if successful, the Kirby estate would enter into negotiation with Marvel over terms to continue publishing comics based on his work.

Seems the merger with Disney is bringing the leeches out of the woodwork for Marvel. I gotta say this shines bad on them. Kirby only CO-created them so they have a minimal claim at best mainly because the ONLY one one that list that Kirby SOLELY created is the Silver Surfer.

What's next Bob Kane's{Creator of Batman} family get greedy as well?

[gallas]

DC's IPs (Intellectual Properties) are safe and secure. Especially Batman. As far as the Kirby Estate doing what it did, it's expected. In fact, I saw it coming myself. Stan Lee obviously had some say in the decision to sell to Disney, and in that he was obviously compensated for his end of the original Marvel IPs he was solely responsible for (Spider Man, Dare Devil, etc.) The Kirby family had been out of the Marvel loops for some time, just collecting on residual royalties. So what's it the tehy when Marvel's sold? The terminate their existing copyrights, so that they can renew them, and re-sell the rights BACK to "The New Marvel" for even more coin. Stan Lee's handling of it was exemplary. The Kirby Estate's handling of it is purely money driven. They want top dollar for their "half" of Marvel's franchise entries. That's business for you. But meanwhile, all those series are now in limbo as far as media outside of print. The Thor and Avenger films will still release on time, as they're part of the Pre-Disney contract Marvel had with Fox, but after that, their won't be any new films using said characters listed in Vault's quote until The Kirby Estate negotiates new deals with Fox & Paramount individually, if they even WANT new deals, since The Kirby Estate will obviously be looking for more green.

And who suffers in the end? Why the fans of course. No surprises there.