Superman lawsuit update

Update: news from CBR and Newsarama (here and here), both written by lawyers who know how to interpret all this legalese.

I haven't posted an update to the Superboy/Superman lawsuit lately, but something new came out on Wednesday.

The BEAT wrote

The Siegel family — including Joanne Siegel and Laura Sigel Larson — were granted half the copyright to Superman in 1999, and the present case involved their share of the revenue from such Superman appearances as SMALLVILLE. The Siegels argued that a “sweetheart deal” from Warner Bros. led to lower than market value licensing fees for the use of Superman.

Jeff Trexler at Newsarama posted that:

Last year a federal court awarded the Siegel heirs half of the copyright in the Superman material in Action Comics #1. Remaining to be decided, however, was how much that copyright interest was worth.

Today the court released its ruling on the first issue related to this question: namely

“whether the license fees paid” by Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. (“Warner Bros”) to its corporate sibling, DC Comics, for the audiovisual rights to the Superman copyright pursuant to various licensing agreements entered into during the 1999 to 2002 period “represents the fair market value therefor, or whether the license for the works between the related entities was a ‘sweetheart deal.’”

These licensing agreements included the TV series "Smallville", the movie "Superman Returns", and animated shows such as "Justice League" and "Legion of Super Heroes".

CBR has more here, and The BEAT has more as well.

There's still a big part of the Superman lawsuit still remaining (but hopefully in the near future), and the Superboy copyright lawsuit is supposed to follow that one.