Dr. Mecha, on 03 December 2011 - 05:50 AM, said:
He goal is to make money off of the characters he made with the story he help developed. It would be nice he comes back to Archie and continue working there like they offer him to do, but he didn't take that offer.
Characters and stories that he created for a licensed character that he does not own the license for.
Personally I don't get it. It clearly states in every issue: "SEGA, Sonic the Hedgehog,
and all related characters and indicia are either registered trademarks or trademarks of SEGA CORPORATION. Am I missing something? Even if Archie does not have a "Copyright" they have a licensing contract with SEGA to use their property for a specific purpose. Anything that is additionally created by whomever they contract/hire should become the intellectual property of the original party by default. The only way around that I would think would be if Ken had a stipulation in his contract with Archie that has SEGA's approval/signature that he owns the individual characters he created.
However, there is an interesting article over here about it with the likes of DC and Marvel specifically:
http://www.comicbook...y/news/?a=41001 This part of it jumps out the most to me:
3. Work Made for Hire
The issue of authorship is mute in the comic book world today because of the work-made-for-hire doctrine. Congress gave a detailed definition of the work-made-for-hire doctrine in the 1976 Act:
A “work made for hire” is
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting, upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities. (FN 30)
With the work-for-hire doctrine there is no issue of who owns the copyright to a comic book character because once these individuals are under Marvels payroll all the intellectual property rights that are vested into a comic book, the heroes in them, and the heroes’ component parts are all owned by Marvel.
Take out Marvel and insert Archie, which in turn would go to SEGA, and it pretty much sums itself up. I would hope Archie would be smart enough to do such a thing.
