Superman IP Fight Turns on Newly Questioned Foreign Rights Canon

A Superman co-creator’s estate’s bid to reclaim foreign copyrights and block the new superhero film’s release comes months after a federal judge upended legal consensus around limitations of US copyright termination.

Mark Warren Peary, executor of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s estate, sued in January to block DC Comics, Warner Bros., and Discovery Inc. from releasing the movie in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Ireland. He argued relevant copyright law in those countries automatically reverts rights to creators’ heirs 25 years after an author’s death—which would unwind Schuster’s 1938 deal with DC’s predecessor.

Termination rights under the Copyright Act allow creators and heirs to reclaim valuable IP signed away decades earlier. But entertainment industry consensus was that those terminations can’t claw back assignments of foreign rights.

The latest reboot of the Superman film series will debut on July 11.

Last year, a Louisiana federal judge rejected that consensus and found there are no distinct foreign rights. The opinion in Vetter v. Resnik said under the Berne Convention copyright treaty, 181 nations agree to recognize an original copyright, not create new parallel ones with independent fates. This would mean termination status of US works governs globally, a major departure from scant but unanimous prior court opinions.

“Everyone in the business assumed the termination right applied to US rights, not worldwide rights,” entertainment attorney Owen J. Sloane of Eisner LLP said. “It came as quite a shock to the copyright bar.”

That reasoning would be a boon to US creators and heirs looking to terminate grants by putting global rights back on the table in US courts, Sloane said.

“At first when I heard about the opinion, I thought ‘This doesn’t make sense,’” Sloane said. “But when I read it, it’s very well reasoned. It’s hard to poke holes in it.”

The premise of the Vetter decision strikes at the heart of the current Superman case while rejecting the logic of a separate 2008 Superman ruling. DC may be unable to invoke it to block the injunction bid, however, because in that prior opinion it retained foreign rights under the opposite conclusion.

Shuster’s estate hopes to use the rights-dividing ruling to claw back some international rights in the latest turn in what the creators decry as decades of ruthless exploitation as Superman’s creators struggled to get by. They’ve previously lost bids to reclaim US rights via termination.

Rights of Steel

Peary’s complaint is the latest in a decades-long legal fight over the iconic character, and described DC’s handling of Superman—originally purchased for $130—as part of a “long tradition of leaving its authors impoverished.” DC agreed to pay co-creators Jerry Siegel and Shuster each a $20,000 annual pension in 1975 amid publicity over their financial struggles.

Months after Shuster’s 1992 death, his siblings signed a one-page agreement for DC to pay them $25,000 per year to settle “all claims to any payments or other rights.” Peary in 2003 sued to terminate the 1938 agreement, but the Ninth Circuit ultimately affirmed the siblings’ 1992 agreement already supplanted it.

Meanwhile, a 2008 partial win for Siegel’s heirs said Copyright Act termination only applied to US rights—though the termination itself was later overturned.

Other cases involving Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character and a 1969 Joe Crawford song “Bye Bye Blackbird” have reached, or at least presumed, the same conclusion about termination rights.

Judge Shelly D. Dick of the District of Louisiana found it all unpersuasive. Siegel cited only copyright scholars rather than case law, she said in her July 2024 opinion, and other cases either relied on Siegel or didn’t directly address the question. She pointed to the 1998 Second Circuit ruling, Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier Inc., which she said held that copyright ownership was determined by the country closest to the work while enforcement hinged on law where infringement took place.

Termination, she reasoned, was more akin to an ownership question. While the Copyright Act precludes termination of “rights arising under” foreign law, she said a foreign protection of US work “arises under” US law; that right is merely recognized abroad.

Resnik’s appeal is pending at the Fifth Circuit.

“I haven’t seen any foreign ruling on this question, and I haven’t seen any definitive treatise statement from any scholar in the field that answers this question definitively one way or the other,” IP attorney Joshua Graubart said.

Attorneys for DC and Peary declined to comment.

Foreign Interpretation

Peary’s injunction bid is likely doomed, IP attorney Rom Bar-Nissim of Heah Bar-Nissim LLP said, citing the high bar for injunctions, irreparable harm in blocking a major movie premiere, and the delay bringing the suit in 2025 when rights allegedly reverted in 2017. The original Superman would fall into the public domain in less than a decade, he noted.

“This is a death rattle grasp for some lucrative IP,” said Bar-Nissim, who said Dick’s ruling “is much more sound” than previously prevailing wisdom.

IP professor Kevin J. Greene of Southwestern Law School agreed the delay presented a significant obstacle. He expressed sympathy over the “sordid” story of the creators’ treatment, but also questioned why they waited to sue and said they may have a more sympathetic forum in the countries where they hope to reclaim rights.

Even if US courts answer the question definitively, nothing would bind foreign courts to agree—much less block a movie release based on US litigation, Graubert said.

“I’ve been looking at the treaty for 20 years and it never dawned on me that it would be interpreted the other way. But an English academic told me it was always presumed” that works had one copyright and changes in ownership would be recognized abroad, Graubart said. “If you have a ruling from a US court that says one thing, will a foreign court say ‘Well, I guess,’ or ‘What do you know about Canadian law?’”

The case is: Peary v. DC Comics Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-cv-00910.