Determining Ownership

How do you go about Determining Ownership of a Copyright?

It’s not always easy to figure out who owns a copyright. There have been cases where filmmakers were forced to remove music from a movie because, while they did get permission from the musician, it turned out that the musician’s employing music label were the people who actually owned the copyright. Certainly, copyrights can be registered to companies, rather than to individual people. For example, Batman has been the property of DC Comics since the creation of the character back in the early twentieth century. For several decades, Bob Kane, the artist responsible for designing Batman, actually had no say in any matters regarding the character. It wasn’t until the 1960’s, when Bob Kane started threatening DC Comics with legal action, that he was given any creative control over the character. And even then, the copyright still belonged to DC Comics, and Kane was only given the responsibilities of a sort of advisor on the property. DC Comics could still make a movie without Kane’s consent, but as creator, Kane was given royalty fees and so on, and allowed to advise on all matters pertaining to the character.

But then there’s Bill Finger. Bill Finger was the actual creator of Batman, and as you may have noticed, we didn’t mention his name once in the above paragraph.

The actual story of the creation of Batman goes something like this; Bob Kane was working as a comic book and commercial artist at the time, and after the release of Superman, Kane began trying to invent his own superhero to sell to the publishers of Superman. Kane’s first drawings basically had Superman in a black cape, calling himself “The Bat!”

Kane asked his friend Bill Finger to come over and help him make the character more unique. Legend has it that Finger agreed to help design and write for the character in exchange for a bottle of whiskey, not knowing how far the idea would actually go. Finger suggested giving “The Bat” a more brooding persona, a mask with bat’s ears, a scalloped cape, like Dracula, a gray and black color scheme, a bat symbol on his chest, and to change the name from “The Bat” to “Batman”.

That Bill Finger was perhaps the most important person to the creation of the character of Batman really didn’t amount to much in the long run, and beyond receiving some low pay for scripting a few Batman stories in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Finger hasn’t seen a dime from Batman comic books, merchandise, movies, or the TV show. In later years, another comic book artist attended a comic book awards show and jokingly suggested that they invent a new award to give out to visionary artists who don’t get their fair share of ownership on their own creations. Named for Bill Finger, this would be called “The Finger Award”. The artist then proceeded to extend his middle finger to the crowd.

If nothing else, this story should go to show that it’s not always easy to determine who created what, it’s not always easy to determine who a property belongs to, and throughout the history of published media, an author being allowed to keep their creations is actually somewhat rare.

Whoever actually winds up owning an intellectual property’s copyright, more often than not, simply comes down to who bothered to put a copyright on it. If you were inclined to look them up, there are more than a few stories out there about unscrupulous people who blatantly steal ownership out from under the original authors. There are literally hundreds of cases where the strangest things happen with regards to authorship.

Take, for example, Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay for “Rocky Balboa”. The movie only came out a couple years ago, but he had originally began work on the script almost a decade ago. At one point, he had sold the screenplay to a certain studio, but then that studio decided not to produce it! Until they were willing to let the script go, Stallone had to put his own movie on hold because he didn’t have the legal right to use his own characters or his own story.

If you want to find out who a copyright belongs to, you can simply look it up online or in the “fine print” that comes attached to most copyright protected media, but remember that the world of copyright ownership can get pretty convoluted, and sometimes, really cutthroat. If you’re selling any intellectual property to anyone: Cover yourself. If you’re working with a collaborator: Cover yourself. Register your work with a notary public or even by mailing copies to yourself. You need to have some precedent, because you honestly never know when you’re going to become eligible for a “Finger Award”.