The parties are two of the most renowned figures in comics. Neil Gaiman is the author of numerous comic book stories and novels, including the Sandman series, while Todd McFarlane is a writer and illustrator who has contributed to the Spiderman and Batman series and who created the Spawn series in 1992. Gaiman was temporarily brought on by McFarlane in late 1992 to contribute new ideas to the Spawn series, including a script and three new characters. After years of operating through an informal oral agreement regarding use of the characters Gaiman brought to Spawn, the relationship between the parties soured in the late 1990s when the parties tried to reduce their understanding to a written contract. Ultimately, McFarlane abandoned the parties’ three-year effort to reach an accord, and, in 1999, Gaiman sued, seeking a declaratory judgment that he was a co-author with McFarlane of the characters he helped create during his stint as a Spawn contributor. After a jury trial, Gaiman was granted a declaratory judgment of co-ownership of the characters in question, along with monetary relief and an accounting. McFarlane appealed.
The Seventh Circuit upheld the timeliness of Gaiman’s suit under the Copyright Act, rejecting McFarlane’s argument that the copyright notices and registration filings omitting Gaiman as a co-author should have put him on notice of an adverse claim of ownership by McFarlane. Because a comic book is a collaborative compilation, the Court held that McFarlane’s copyright notice nd copyright registrations listing only himself as owner were not adverse to Gaiman’s separate and distinct copyrights in the elements of his contributions to the collective work and registration of the latter did not trigger the statute of limitations as to the collective work.
Having determined that Gaiman’s action was not barred by the statute of limitations, the Court turned to the copyrightability of the characters Gaiman had contributed to the Spawn series. While acknowledging that neither stock characters nor Gaiman’s character ideas alone would be copyrightable, the comic book characters realized by the joint authors of the Spawn comic books were protected by copyright because they all had sufficiently distinct appearances, names and manners of speech. As the person who contributed the detailed ideas for these characters, the Court determined that Gaiman was a co-author of them for purposes of copyright law.
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