Sammataro weighs Stallone/Rocky rights contest – Media and Entertainment Law

While Stallone’s public dissatisfaction with the ownership situation didn’t spill over into any legal action, disputes over the copyright and ownership of fictional characters were fairly common and almost always went in the direction of content owners. The world of comics is particularly littered with legal battles from the legacy of creators like Jack Kirby against the characters they created (like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men), with courts ultimately ruling in Marvel or DC’s favor.

James Sammataro, a partner at Pryor Cashman and co-chair of the company’s media and entertainment group, explained that the cases rely on the provisions of the Copyright Act that Congress created for cases before the current Copyright Act of 1976 because of deals that preceded that. In this provision, creators can issue “rights of termination” in an attempt to reclaim their copyrights some 35 years after the original deal.

According to Sammataro, the reason many of these cases favor the current rights holder is because it relies on proving that the original work was developed outside of a “work-for-rent” situation, or that the project was developed without being developed . Commissioned by the rights holder to clarify the purpose of selling the work. Especially the property of comic books, the case found that the works were made for rental, so the court sided with the rights holder.

“When you do something for the sake of hiring, the company you provide the service to becomes the owner,” Sammataro explained. “In most cases, it turns out that it was a work made for hire, so the employer or the company provided the tools, heavily edited the project, outsourced the work, essentially the management ethos behind the work of this Man is more like a scribe than the source of its creation.”

For the original author’s case, Sammataro pointed to a 2018 lawsuit on “Friday the 13th,” in which original screenwriter Victor Miller took full ownership of the original script after a court ruled in his favor, as An example of termination right inheritance. In that case, the court ruled in Miller’s favor, saying that the original script was not produced on the basis of employment work, was not prepared within the scope of employment, and that he was an independent contractor working on the project.