Public Domain Captain Marvel

[Indywesternfan]

Let me begin by saying how much I enjoy your website, its great. Being able to download great old comics and read them blown up on my
computer. I miss not going to the recent Chicago Comic Con. I went there quite a few years when it was held over the July 4th weekend. Those were better times. I was just wondering, you only have public domain comics. But isn't Captain Marvel owned by DC? I was thinking the
other day, I wish they could put some Bob Hope and Fox and Crow comics on DCM. It is unfortunate that there are a lot of comics that will never be re-published and never be available on the internet. They are sort of in limbo. All of those great Carl Barks comics. Gone but not
forgotten. i guess they are obsolete by today's comic market place. I guess I should try to be more optimistic.   Brian

[John C]

Don't be optimistic, be angry.  Why?  It's a result of Congress extending retroactive copyrights twice in the last forty years, as copyright has mutated conceptually from an incentive to publish your work to a "right" artists (and big media companies) have to make money.

Every year that goes by without things fallling into the public domain, someone's copy of an obscure comic doesn't survive.  The same goes for films and books.  And right now, the only people preserving the material are breaking the law.

The only way to stop this is to watch for copyright legislation comes before Congress, and bug your Representative and Senators.  The recent flurry of (failed, thankfully) bills like SOPA would have given permission to erase entire sites and block their funding on an accusation of infringement, for example, making sharing anything a danger.

Oops.  I seem to have walked across the soapbox again, but I think it's a big deal.

[Drahken]

re captain marvel (and som other characters, like plastic man and archie): From what I understand of the whole copyright mess, the characters and the publications are each copyrighted seperately from each other. The characters are still under copyright, but some of the old publications have fallen into the public domain. The net result being that while you couldn't legally use the characters in a NEW publication, you can legally share & reprint the existing publication.
I've seen this happen with a lot of old cartoons, including popeye, superman, even some disney toons.

[John C]

Sorry, overlooked that part.

Jim's close, but you can create a "deriived work" from anything that's public domain, as well.  Since there's no such thing as a copyright for a "character," that means that many people should be able to (I don't think there's ever been a court case on the topic) derive stories from a public domain character.  (For example, Asylum created their own "John Carter" movie a couple of years back, despite Disney working on their movie and several John Carter books still being under copyright.)

DC did buy "the rights" from CBS (who apparently bought them when Fawcett went out of business), but when the books' copyrights expire, they expire, no matter who owns them.  Public domain books, as Jim says, can be republished unquestionably, because the copyrights aren't connected.  (Comic companies are historically unclear as to what "the rights" are, exactly, that they're buying.  More than a few times, DC has claimed to buy or license characters from books that were clearly in the public domain.  Did they buy trademarks?  Were they just trying to scare other people off?  Nobody knows.)

[Drahken]

Uh.. "jim"?? I think you have me confused with someone else.

As for character rights, it might be that they're trademarked rather than copyrighted. *shrug* While the 2 concepts are legally distinct from one another, the practical difference is negligable.
I know there was that big case a number of years back, where disney sued some daycare center for painting disney characters on their walls without permission, then after all the publicity the incident got, universal came in and painted their own characters on the daycare's walls for free.

[John C]

Yeah, it was morning and I read someone else's message.  Realized it as I was driving to work.

In any case, the difference is that copyright means that you can't use it.  Trademark means you can't poach someone else's customers, basically (Disney--and the courts that award to them--worry that the pictures without a license imply that Disney endorses the hospital).  There's overlap to the extent of producing a Batman movie, but outside of that, not much.

[narfstar]

As long as you do not prominently put Captain Marvel or the name Captain Marvel on the cover you could make a new CM comic. Same would be for the original version of the Charlton Action heroes. They are public domain because the originals did not carry a proper copyright notice. With the difference in appearance you may even be able to put them prominently on the cover. That could be why DC changed each of them so much.

[John C]

I'd say "probably," but it mostly depends on the scenario.  The way to think about it, rather than "on the cover," is that you can't trade on someone else's reputation.  So, if one of your selling points is a character someone else is known for using, it'll probably get you into trouble.

It's possible to interpret that as "just the cover," but I'm not so sure that you'd win in court if DC sued with such a narrow reading.  The primary concern is that nobody can confuse your product as coming from a more established company, so the "rules" probably depend on the customers.

As an example, Apple is trying to convince courts that (among other things) cellphone owners are naive enough to not be able to tell the difference between products if they're all black rectangles with rounded corners.  It wouldn't be hard to argue the opposite, that comic readers or movie-goers, because of reviews and a shared culture, are savvy enough to make decisions based on what characters appear inside.

Mind you, that's not advice for anybody, just pointing out that it could get much more complicated, depending on the product, audience, and likely plaintiff.  And in a Disney-like case, you'd probably be forced out of business even if you're in the right, because it's economical for them to drag the case out until you go bankrupt paying legal fees or settle.  Remember "Uncensored Mouse," in fact, Eclipse's reprinting of Mickey Mouse comic strips (which had long fallen into the public domain) under a black cover, wrapped in plastic.  They probably wouldn't have won in court, but Eclipse couldn't have survived to the end.

[Drahken]

Now that would be an interesting project, getting a list of how many currently licensed & famous characters (like captain marvel, plastic man, and archie) are in public domain comics.

[RJ Bowman]

There was, many years ago, a comic called "The Uncensored Mickey", that reprinted early Mickey Mouse newspaper strips that were firmly in the public domain. The publisher was forced to cease publication by Disney's litigation machine.