Steve Ditko’s Estate Is Attempting to Reclaim the Copyrights to Spider-Man and Doctor Strange
The estate of comic book legend Steve Ditko has filed notice of termination with the United States Copyright Office with regards to the copyrights of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange that are currently held by Marvel Entertainment. Ditko, as the co-creator of both of the characters, is attempting to use a right introduced in the 1976 Copyright Act that allows creators to terminate copyrights of works that the creators had previously assigned to another person or entity.
The trick here, though, is that that right only exists if you transferred the copyright of the character to the other person/entity. If you instead, created the character as “work for hire,” the other person/entity is considered the originator of the copyright and thus you cannot request termination. Here, Marvel Entertainment claims that Steve Ditko created these characters as “work for hire” and thus cannot actually terminate the copyrights of the characters.
