Schuster’s Heirs Lose Superman Copyright Battle Against Warner Bros

The long running copyright case over who owns Superman looks like it may finally be ending. Deadline has just reported that Warner Brothers has won the legal battle after a Judge determined that a 20 year old agreement between the estate of Supes’ co-creator Joe Schuster and DC Comics negated the heirs’ ability to terminate the copyright they had granted.

Deadline has an upload of the dismissal, in which judge Otis Wright III stated “The Court finds that the 1992 Agreement, which represented the Shuster heirs’ opportunity to renegotiate the prior grants of Joe Shuster’s copyrights, superseded and replaced all prior grants of the Superman copyrights. The 1992 Agreement thus represents the parties’ operative agreement and, as a post-1978 grant, it is not subject to termination”.

Rights from some of Superman’s early titles were set to return to the heirs on October 26, 2013.

What are your thoughts on the case and its conclusion? I wasn’t extremely familiar with it, but to my uneducated eyes, it simply looks like the estate made a bad deal back in the day, and now wants to undo it. In that case, isn’t the ruling just?

Source: Deadline