May gain access to docs supporting case against Toberoff
DC Comics could gain access to a trove of documents that it claims bolsters its case against Marc Toberoff, the attorney representing the heirs to the creators of “Superman” who have so far been successful in winning back some of the rights to the Man of Steel.
A federal magistrate judge ruled Wednesday that the documents were not protected by attorney-client privilege but put the decision on hold until Toberoff and his attorneys can seek a decision from district court Judge Otis Wright.
In a suit filed last year, DC Comics, a division of Warner Bros., charged that Toberoff poisoned its relationships with the heirs to Superman co-creators Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster in an attempt to gain his own control over ownership of the character’s copyrights.
DC Comics included in its suit an unsigned document, the “Superman-Marc Toberoff Timeline,” that makes reference to documents detailing Toberoff’s business practices and interactions with his clients. But Toberoff says that, as he was in the midst of litigation with DC Comics over Superman, the documents were stolen from his office in 2006 by a former attorney and then delivered to Warner Bros.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ralph Zarefsky said Toberoff “waived the privileges” when he turned in the documents last year in response to a grand jury subpeona, issued after Toberoff met with reps at the U.S. Attorney’s office to discuss an investigation of the theft. Toberoff’s attorneys say that they have an agreement with government that the documents would be “maintained as strictly confidential.”
Toberoff has been representing the creators’ heirs as they exercise a portion of the 1976 Copyright Act that allows authors to reclaim copyrights to their creations if certain conditions are met. In a counteraction, he’s seeking to have the DC Comics suit against him dismissed and has called it a “desperate and cynical strategy” to distract from their claims.
Source: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118037634?refCatId=13
Posted in 
Tags: 
The entire reason this suit exist is because of an ex post facto law creating new interpretation of agreements DC and Jerry and Joe reached at the inception of Superman and their employment. As far as the actual understanding of the parties at the time, Superman was sold- lock, stock, and barrel… and indeed, that is what the case prior to the ’76 Copyright Act found.
So DC contracted to own Superman just as EVERY publisher contracted to own the works of their creators at the time did and continue to do today under the work-for-hire doctrine (if not explicitly covered by their employment contracts)… but due to some glitch in the date of creation versus hire and due to a law written decades after the fact, the heirs have been granted retroactive rights to something that they were not entitled to prior nor something any international body of law has sought to emulate. ONLY the US has termination rights and they are almost universally viewed as a quagmire of unintended consequences, even Judge Larson could not help but editorialize that the intention of the law could never have been to create a piecemeal Superman- “a cape here, a villain there” but rather deal with rights as an “aggregate whole.”
The bottom line is while it is entirely the heirs’ legal right to pursue their statutory termination rights, the rights themselves are not sound in terms of law, policy, facts, philosophy, or morality. The law doesn’t protect similarly situated creators who don’t have the benefit of the same contractual glitches, the law isn’t respected internationally, the law does follow the creator’s moral wishes but assigns a set prescribed remedy which does not support the underlying tenants of IP policy, and as a matter of fact, in this specific case, a third party will more readily profit from the case than any of the legislated parties.
Supporting the heirs in the case is more a matter of spite than logic, law, justice, or reality.