Greetings True Believers!
Stan Lee Media Inc continued their ridiculous parade of lawsuits today, claiming “Defendant The Walt Disney Company has represented to the public that it, in fact, owns the copyright to these characters as well as to hundreds of other characters created by Stan Lee. Those representations made to the public by The Walt Disney Company are false.”
Ummmm. . . that ain’t how I heard it.
For those unfamiliar with these charlatans, whose Wikipedia page even refers to them as “a sleazy Internet start-up that could function as the poster child for the excesses of the turn-of-the-century era.” (PS– you could say much worse things about them. Hint, hint.) let’s go back in time to the late ’90s. Clinton was getting impeached over sex he may or may not have had depending on your definition of “sex” and “is”, the economy and the internet were booming, and Marvel Comics was going broke. Stan Lee even briefly left Marvel, suing them for breach of contract and taking his character rights with him. He then formed Stan Lee Media Inc with the intent to create a web-based platform for distributing Stan the Man’s numerous intellectual properties.
Just like so many internet startups, it went belly-up, Stan and Marvel reconciled, and he took the character rights back with him to The House of Ideas. Or so go the rulings of several federal court cases. Those who continued to pretend to be the vestigial SLMI (remember that Stan Lee himself is no longer involved with them–they’re just using his name) have then continued with their lawsuits throughout the last decade, despite judge after judge and case after case ruling against them, in the vain hopes of being able to extract dollars out of Marvel, and now Disney. Any surprise this coincides after the success of Avengers? Not. at. all.
Deadline Hollywood explained the gist of their suit thusly:
In its suit, SLMI says that Lee signed over the rights to comic book characters that he created or would create to its corporate predecessor in October 1998. The comic writer and publisher was paid for the rights in shares in Stan Lee Media, Inc. The shares later proved worthless when the dot-com bubble burst at the end of the 1990s, leaving the company to unsuccessfully seek bankruptcy protection in 2001. In its complaint today, SLMI says an amended version of that October 1998 agreement was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2000, clearly indicating its rights. “Oddly, in November, 1998, Stan Lee signed a written agreement with Marvel Enterprises, Inc. in which he purportedly assigned to Marvel the rights to the Characters. However, Lee no longer owned those rights since they had been assigned to SLEI previously. Accordingly, the Marvel agreement actually assigned nothing,” the suit notes. Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion in August 2009 with the deal confirmed at the end of that year. Stan Lee Media Inc. is represented by John McDermott of Denver’s Brownstein Hyatt Faber Schreck and Robert Chapan and Jon-Jamison Hill of Beverly Hills’ Eisner, Kahan & Gorry.
The other lawsuits making these same claims have largely been thrown out. It is likely this case will be ruled res judicata, which means a matter already ruled on. So what it really is, is a vain attempt to file enough lawsuits that Disney will simply settle with them out of court because they could settle for less than the cost of paying their attorneys to win the case. I think they are sorely mistaken. Do you have any idea how many lawyers work for Disney? And how much work they will do to protect one of their most lucrative cash cows right now? If I were a Disney lawyer, I’d be figuring out how to countersue for defamation and harassment. But that’s just me.
So, until She-Hulk, Matt Murdock, and Foggy Nelson can’t figure out how to outmaneuver anyone legally, MAKE MINE MARVEL (and not some crappy former busted dot com that thinks it still owns the rights to the Marvel characters)