Intellectual Property Part I: The Debate

It's 2012. Nearing close and closer to 2013. In this day and age, an idea can be considered worth more than any tangible object. Ideas have proven to be worth billions. Bill Gates created the personal computer. Steve Jobs created the iPod. Ideas revolutionize the way people live their lives, especially in the advanced civilizations we live in now. How are these ideas protected? An idea can't be held in your hand; one can only use their imagination to create and manifest their ideas into tangible objects, like Gates' personal computer and Jobs' iPod. Your intangible ideas can be preserved and your ideas do have exclusive rights. It is called intellectual property.

Intellectual property rights include things like copyright, trademarks and patents. According to Jonah Lehrer, in his book Imagine, it was in Shakespeare's time, around the 1580's that the concept of intellectual property really took off. It was was at this time, Lehrer says that people realized that "ideas have value."  Inventions, books, recipes and many things you use in your daily life are subject to intellectual property. Including comic books. Comic books, however, have a pretty difficult history with intellectual property.

Since comic books were first created in the 1960's, there has been much debate over who actually owns the intellectual property behind the heroes in comics. Is it the original creator(s)? The current writer(s)? The company that owns the comic? One of the biggest issues right now is the battle between Marvel (now owned by Disney) and 20th Century Fox, not for comic books, but rather for film.

Marvel's The Avengers

Before Marvel was bought by Disney, the company went through a few rough patches and in the process, sold the rights of several comic book super heroes in an attempt to make money. Fox now owns the rights to Daredevil, Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four and many of the most famous X-Men. Marvel also licensed other characters to different studios, including Spider-Man and Ghost Rider to Sony and the Punisher to Lionsgate.

At first, this all sounded good in theory, but the tragedy behind it lies in the fact that Marvel cannot use these superheroes in their own movies so long as the rights are licensed to other companies. One of the biggest events in the Marvel universe occurred when a series called Civil War went into publication in 2006. Due to how successful the book series was, I can only assume that they would want to make a movie based on it. But the civil war is between almost all major Marvel super heroes, including the ones whose licenses are to other studios. I'm not alone on this assumption, either! Comicbookmovie.com user steveorjoe bases his entire lawyer-like argument around the fact that Marvel would certainly want to create Civil War into a live-action movie, especially since movies like Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Avengers did so well in the box office. He claims, "They would have to get the intellectual property rights back from these other studios before they could start production on such a major film without being sued by one of the other studios." Steveorjoe and I aren't the only ones who can see the issue in this. Thousands of comments are flooding webpages and forums on the internet of outraged fans.

So long as companies like Fox and Sony keep producing movies with these characters, they renew their licensing to use these characters. The latest Spider-Man movie that came out last summer, The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone seemed to have relaunched the entire Spider-Man story all over again, even though Spider-Man 3 with Tobey Maguire was just released in 2007. Why? Well, some speculate it was to renew Sony's license for Spider-Man so they won't lose to to Marvel because comic book movies are such a huge box office success right now.

These legal battles will continue to rage on until Marvel regains their intellectual property, so for now, the war carries on...