The negative effects of these deals on creators is one thing, but it is worth considering that the delay of these works entering the public domain is a cultural disaster. After a reasonable amount of time these creations were intended by the founding fathers to become part of our culture for anyone to use without fear of penalty. Instead you might get a cease-and-desist for posting a family video on YouTube that shows you singing the Happy Birthday song (copyright owned by Warner-Chappell).

Jamie said—

“Donenfeld and Liebowitz likely knew they wouldn’t be able to snow Jerry a 2nd time and simply elected to wait until he was drafted and start publishing it without paying him anything.”
_____

I don’t know if ’simply elected to wait until he was drafted’ are the correct words, only because they probably wouldn’t have known he was going to be drafted, but other than that minor quibble, I agree.

- Promised Jerry he and Shuster they would share the wealth and their rights would be looked after. They clearly shared very little of the wealth and they were reminded that DC owned the character and they had no rights when they wanted to negotiate a much better deal for the Superman newspaper strip.

- Took away the Superman shop when Siegel was in serving during WW2.

- Refuse to allow them to restart the shop, thereby reducing their income.

- Turned down Superboy, waited until Siegel was in the Army and then began publishing him. I believe Siegel knew his chances at getting a fair deal for Superman was slim once the real nature of the DC owners was revealed to him. I’m sure he was planning on negotiating a *much* better contract for Superboy. Donenfeld and Liebowitz likely knew they wouldn’t be able to snow Jerry a 2nd time and simply elected to wait until he was drafted and start publishing it without paying him anything. They stuck Superboy in an anthology title and kept him there probably to help mitigate any losses by arguing Superboy was only a part of the reason for the title’s profits. When the case was settled Superboy got his own title.

- Rather than work out a fair deal with Siegel and Shuster, let things go until the point the two felt they had to sue DC. They did the typical drag them out until they can’t afford to pay their lawyers anymore tactic which forced them to settle for a fraction of the amount Superboy was worth.

- Removed Siegel and Shusters byline from any and all Superman products. Even when somebody did put it on, they made sure to take it off again.

- In the 50s Joe Shuster was spotted doing delivery work in shabby clothes outside of DC’s building. DC asked him come in the next day, they gave him $100 for an overcoat to hide the shabby clothes and told him to never come to their building again.

- God knows what Wiesinger put him through during the 50s when he began writing for DC again. To be fair Wiesinger was shitty to pretty much all the freelancers.

- During the 60/70s lawsuit over the 28 year copyright renewal they suggested to Siegel that if he dropped his case they would negotiate a fair settlement. He dropped his case and then there was no settlement offer from DC.

- Knew full well that the creators were extremely poor. Shuster was legally blind, living on welfare and supported in part by his brother. Siegel at one point had to get low paying 9-5 jobs (I’ve heard mail clerk and security guard) but still didn’t care even though they were multi-millionaires.

- When Robinson and Adams were doing the negotiations for Siegel and Shuster the last major sticking point was creator credits. It was something *somebody* at DC really did not want the creators to get, but they did eventually get it. I strongly suspect if it were not for Jay Emmett, Warner Brothers Executive Vice President who cared more about the Superman movie going through with no negative PR than keeping Siegel and Shuster poor there wouldn’t have been any deal.

And there may or may not have been some dickish behaviour going on behind the scenes over the last 9 years or so while this current lawsuit is ongoing.

Well, Jamie did give his overview on the characters of Donenfeld and Liebowitz in his post above. In most of the accounts of the era, Donenfeld and Liebowitz were KNOWN to be hard-nosed/unscrupulous publishers. Siegel is KNOWN to have been promised the moon and the stars which he, yes foolishly, never got in writing. Donenfeld was a bootlegger and pornographer who lied about going to business school.

So I don’t really get what your question was. Siegel and Shuster were naive young dreamers who got taken advantage of over and over and over, and never really had good advice from anyone who was trustworthy until the end of their lives. Donenfeld and Leibowitz were opportunistic publishers who had no respect for the medium they pioneered. We’re still paying the price for their contempt.

So, you can say S&S got what they deserved. Did they deserve more than $130 for creating the greatest superhero of all times? Legally, no. Ethically? Well, that’s where it’s a judgment call.

Overall, I prefer not to take the side of people like Donenfeld.

Jonathan, I have to agree with “bad wolf” above. Maybe reading Jamie Coville’s post or some of the links would enlighten you more than this whole “me am unfrozen caveman Objectivist…no understand your ‘linkage’” business. When you have had time to read the relevant material and feel qualified to have an opinion, please come back.

You, sir, will never be “enlightened.”

It seems that I’ll have to do my own research to answer the questions that I have, and when I have the time I will indeed check out the links provided, but I just don’t have that much time during my work day sadly. The problem I had was that no one could explain to me what this guy (or guys) did to S&S that was so unethical; it was merely stated “they got screwed.” All I know is they signed a contract, but I don’t know any of the details surrounding it which is ultimately what will fill in this picture.

Jamie –

I don’t think your analogy really helps me in this instance. I could very well understand that as a possible scenario, but it doesn’t tell me what Mr. Donenfield did that makes him similar to this aforementioned vacuum cleaner salesman. What I need here to understand the situation is what he said and did to Mr. Siegel and Mr. Schuster that makes him akin to the door-to-door pest. I appreciate the effort, but it’s the details that are being left out of the story that I now need to seek out on my own to figure out how I feel about the situation and how it went down.

I thought I could get a synopsis of what happened and understand this debate, but it seems that it’s much murkier and much harder to understand than I had previously estimated. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some reliable sources to enlighten me.

– Jonathan

Let’s not go overboard here, Heidi. This is purely a question of copyright extension, and who gets the extended period - the original creator or the later purchaser. There are perfectly good logical reasons for giving it to the original creator, as otherwise the purchaser gets a windfall by acquiring an extended copyright period that he never paid for.

But as I understand it, it’s purely and simply a question of whether the Siegels can tick all the boxes and whether they jumped through all the procedural hoops. It makes no difference whether the original deal was good or bad. It may well be that in this particular case, the law has redressed an injustice in the original deal, but that’s just coincidence.

Say a seemingly nice door to door vacuum salesman gets inside the door of a weak willed little old ladies home. Upon getting in he becomes not so nice. With a mix of badgering, intimidation and even getting a bit angry, he manages to get her to buy a vacuum cleaner she doesn’t need or can really afford.

Say the salesman was smart and didn’t break any laws in doing this. Do we commend him for making that sale? No, because he exhibited scumbag behaviour. We might agree that the weak willed little old lady should stood up for herself and ordered him out of his home and called the cops if he refused. But still, he clearly knew she was a weak willed and preyed upon that to make a sale. Another salesperson would realize that even though they probably *could* badger the woman into buying something, doing so is not a good/moral/ethical thing and choose not to.

Society is much better off when people when people realize they could benefit by taking advantage of somebody, but chose not to do it even if they can get away with it. When people behave this way we don’t always have to watch our backs, not trust anybody, and suspiciously assume everybody is out to screw us. It’s the way the world oughta be if you don’t mind my saying so. Because nobody is perfect and we all got our flaws that somebody can take advantage of in some way. The other way is very negative, depressing and leads to a lot of stress and anguish.

Now enter Donenfeld and Liebowitz.

They were two successful and smart businessmen during the great depression. Jerry and Joe were about 23 years old when they signed over the rights to Superman. They were poor young adults who didn’t know squat about copyright and trademark laws. They had been working in comics for a few years now trying to eek out a living working on original comic books when none had shown to make a profit yet. Because Donenfeld and Liebowitz came across as nice guys and promised them that they’d be looked after both in terms of splitting the profits and guarding their rights the two naively placed their trust in them and signed the contract as is.

When Superman became a smash sensation bigger than anybody had expected or realized, the two owners went back on their word and literally kept 97%+ of the multi-million profits to themselves. Then they successfully worked to reduce the amount that they did give Siegel and Shuster. Much of Jerry and Joe’s income came from the Superman “shop” that made the Superman comics. When Jerry was serving during WWII, DC convinced Shuster to let DC do the Superman books internally. When Siegel came out from the War, he discovered the shop was closed down and wanted to start it up again. DC refused. From there on out the two were likely working for page rates and getting royalties from the Superman comic strip.

And I won’t even get into the Superboy situation as it makes this look mellow in comparison. They lost that court case for a reason.

In summary, Donenfeld and Liebowitz showed scumbag like behaviour. They could have chose to honour their word and fairly share all the wealth Superman was generating. But they chose not to. And while both they and their families lived the rest of their lives as multi-millionaires, Siegel and Shuster would spend the bulk of their lives in total poverty. It was a dick move and they’ve long been called out on it. This ruling goes towards setting things right again, at least for their heirs.

It’s worth noting that Siegel and Shuster did dispute the terms of their contract as early as the ’40s, claiming that they were not given as large a piece of the tie-in profits (from toys, the radio show, etc.) that they claimed Donnefeld and Liebowitz had promised them. They lost the first suit mainly because those promises had been verbal and were not reflected in the specific language of the contract. (They also had very poor legal representation, which didn’t help.) It was a matter of “sure, of course you’ll get this. No, we don’t need to put it into a contract, kids….”

So yes, other Jonathan (nice name), according to Jerry Siegel, the two were screwed by being talked into a contract that didn’t say what they thought it did. At the very least, the whole situation could be considered shady–and Donnefeld was well-known for shady semi-legal dealings.

The difference between a crooked mechanic’s shop is that they are fraudulently representing themselves and the services they provide. In this instance however, to the best of my limited understanding, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Schuster knew full well that they were signing away the rights to the character for $130. If they were snookered into signing something that said ABC when they believed it said XYZ, that would be another matter altogether.

I don’t really know what Harry Donenfield did. I am ignorant of that, and I’ve tried to make that a caveat to everything I’ve said up until and including now. But if he told these two guys “hey, I’ll give you $130 for that story, and you’ll have to sign this contract giving us the copyright,” then I don’t see that as unethical. However, he very well might have not said this, or hidden the fact that they would lose the copyright, or attempted to block them from understanding the contract, etc. etc. Obviously those would be deplorable acts.

I don’t think the law agrees that Donenfield did anything unethical or illegal, but again my understanding of IP law is not very broad. I do believe that the law agrees that since the copyright has now expired that Mr. Siegel’s heirs own half of it, and Time Warner owes some of the profits from the time it expired (1999 is what I’m reading) until today as well as moving forward. This wasn’t a trial to determine guilt or innocence.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve read it seems you believe that DC/Time Warner/Donenfield owe money for every Superman related dollar they have made since his inception. That’s what I can’t support. I do believe this recent ruling was both just and reasonable as based on IP law they are due some compensation for the gains made since 1999 off of the Superman character. Perhaps I could understand your side of things better if you would explain to me more precisely what the unethical transgression was. I don’t find it unethical to tell someone “If you sign a release of rights, I will pay you $130 for your story.”

That belief doesn’t prevent me from assessing someone as an out-and-out slimeball. Mr. Donenfield may very well have been one, but like I keep saying I just don’t know whether he was or not. The only thing I’m saying here is paying someone for the rights to their character is not inherently unethical.

Now ignorance and naivety obviously can and do play into these considerations, but if you’ve got a contract to read, and you sign it without understanding what it says, that’s shame on you. I do however fully well recognize that deals like this that happened close to a hundred years ago are why today I realize essential truths like: don’t sign a contract unless you understand it or else you might lose a lot of money.

– Jonathan

Or, does a Superman in a Cleveland kid’s head still fly?

I put a letter from Jerry to Whitney Ellsworth up on my site. Just to give some corroborating evidence that this was something they were interested in very early, not just the 60s and 70s.

http://www.greendoorfilms.com/blog

That’s… not really irony. In fact, it’s about the opposite. A new law inspired by a person’s plight ends up benefiting the person who was plighted? Not at all unexpected.