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Groovy Gary Faces Front--
- Thread starter Axler
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"However, Magazine Management allegedly never registered the work with the Copyright Office and, pursuant to federal law, Friedrich regained the copyrights to Ghost Rider in 2001."
I saw this yesterday and didn't totally get it. I should say that I haven't seen the movie, but I assume this is JUST about the origin story.
Though was really confuses me is the he only got the copyright back in 2001. If Marvel dropped the ball and never registered it, then surely, by default, he held the copyright all along, no?
(This is a why I write stories and am not a lawyer.)
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Yeah...but it behooves you if you're going to be a professional writer to have a grasp of copyright law, as convoluted as it can be.
Probably what happened with Gary is that he just laid low until the Ghost Rider movie was announced to be in development, did a little digging, found out that the character/concept had never been properly registered and did it himself.
From what I understand there was some unresolved confusion about who owned the Ghost Rider name itself.
Almost all of those old work-for-hire contracts with Marvel (up until the 80s) are full of holes and should be challenged on a lot of fronts.
Probably what happened with Gary is that he just laid low until the Ghost Rider movie was announced to be in development, did a little digging, found out that the character/concept had never been properly registered and did it himself.
From what I understand there was some unresolved confusion about who owned the Ghost Rider name itself.
Almost all of those old work-for-hire contracts with Marvel (up until the 80s) are full of holes and should be challenged on a lot of fronts.
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Having an overview was what confused me about this. But a wife with an MBA in my back-pocket helps with my own legalese translations.
Actually that makes sense. The project is in the offing, so he sits back and waits.
I was reading that there was a Western Comic about the character Ghost Rider, outside Marvel and prior to the motor-bike incarnation.
Of course, the down-side to this is that creators today have a harder time getting deals with big publishers and retaining their rights. And then you get in with a publisher, work on THEIR properties, bring in new stuff (as you being creative) and they own YOUR bits too.
You own properties, Axler. You hire me to write on of the books for you, and I bring in a new villain, or additional support characters. Who owns the new characters? I've actually hit this problem. And the better MY creations, the more likely they are to be "absorbed" by the publisher.
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It depends on the wording of the contract...if you just sign a boilerplate work-for-hire, then you'll have problems claiming the characters you contributed to the overall work.
You can try to make adjustments to it if the publisher is amenable, but most of the time the monoliths like DC and Marvel wouldn't be inclined, unless you have a bankable, "marquee value" name...and even then you might have problems.
But let me add this--if you don't have a contract that SPECIFICALLY addresses all the issues of ownership and copyright transfer, then whatever you bring to the work is legally your intellectual property.
And this all has to be laid out in a written instrument...as the old axiom goes about copyright law-"A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on."
It has to be in writing and it has to be spelled out S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C-A-L-L-Y.
As far as the western Ghost Rider character is concerned, you're absolutely right. Marvel picked up the publishing rights from the defunct Hillman (I think) in the 1960s.
A couple of years later when a question arose about their legal claim to the character and title, they very quickly slapped the Ghost Rider name on Gary Freidrich's Johnny Blaze and re-named the Western title "Night Rider."
Years later the issue was resolved and they ret-conned a connection between the two characters.
You can try to make adjustments to it if the publisher is amenable, but most of the time the monoliths like DC and Marvel wouldn't be inclined, unless you have a bankable, "marquee value" name...and even then you might have problems.
But let me add this--if you don't have a contract that SPECIFICALLY addresses all the issues of ownership and copyright transfer, then whatever you bring to the work is legally your intellectual property.
And this all has to be laid out in a written instrument...as the old axiom goes about copyright law-"A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on."
It has to be in writing and it has to be spelled out S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C-A-L-L-Y.
As far as the western Ghost Rider character is concerned, you're absolutely right. Marvel picked up the publishing rights from the defunct Hillman (I think) in the 1960s.
A couple of years later when a question arose about their legal claim to the character and title, they very quickly slapped the Ghost Rider name on Gary Freidrich's Johnny Blaze and re-named the Western title "Night Rider."
Years later the issue was resolved and they ret-conned a connection between the two characters.
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