The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California refused to find that a grant of film rights in the Superman copyright from DC Comics Inc. to its much larger corporate sibling Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., represented a “sweetheart deal.”1 Had the court found that DC licensed rights to Warner for less than market value, the plaintiffs’ half-interest in the seminal Superman copyright would have brought them considerably higher payments from the Warner-DC arrangement.
The plaintiffs in the action were the widow and daughter of Jerome Siegel, co-creator of the comic book hero, who successfully had terminated the 1938 grant of copyright in the first Superman comic book, Action Comics No. 1, made by Siegel and his creative partner, Joseph Shuster, to the predecessor in interest of DC. (The termination date for Shuster’s statutory successors has been noticed for 2013.)
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