A federal judge here on Wednesday ruled that the heirs of Jerome Siegel — who 70 years ago sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130 — were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character.

A jury trial will now take place to figure out how much Time Warner owes the Siegel’s since they asserted their desire to reclaim the copyright in 1999, and these dollars might include “Superman Returns,” which took $200 Million in the box office and a lot more since in home video, cable licensing, etc.

Of course, Time Warner will appeal.

So what does this mean?
The ever-shifting media landscape has just started morphing on another front. In addition to:

• Television fragmentation
• More movies spreading the box office ever-thinner
• Video games
• Simultaneous media consumption (SIMM)
• Online video
• Social media

We now have entrepreneurial lawyers helping artists and their heirs use loopholes in copyright law to their own advantage.

And so, big media continues to get a little bit smaller every week.

If I were going to college right now, I might major in folklore, since local culture (although “local” itself is changing its meaning rapidly) is going to assume a much greater significance in the next few years.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve been collecting comic books for 35 years, have an original cell from the Max Fleisher Superman cartoons from the 1930s, and I dig how the mythology of the character has matured since his debut in 1939.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were treated horribly by DC Comics and its later corporate parent, Time Warner.  Time Warner has made astonishing profits from the Superman character, from the Christopher Reeve movies to Smallville to Superman Returns and with numberless other products in between.

Siegel and Shuster sold the character back in the 1930s for $130.

Has DC Comics / Time Warner been within its legal rights to say, “we bought it, we own it” even when the two creators were living in poverty? Sure. But the legal thing to do and the right thing to do aren’t always the same. When the first Christopher Reeve movie was a hit in the 1970s, Time Warner — perhaps feeling ashamed of itself — awarded a $20,000 annuity to each of the creators that, again according to NYT, was later increased to $30,000 until the two men died.

The Siegels are simply exercising their own legal rights.

Along with Disney and other big media companies, Time Warner has long lobbied Congress into extending copyright again and again and again in order to keep its lucrative characters out of the public domain. This isn’t in the public interest, but big media companies have a lot more resources than any public domain activists.

All of these things will, I hope, help to combine to create something that I’ve long wished for, an artistic middle class.

Resources on the Superman copyright story:

• Comic Book Resources Superman Copyright FAQ
• October 2007 Portfolio article about the case
• Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily post

Note: Joe Simon, co-creator of Marvel’s Captain America, settled his own copyright lawsuit back in 2003.

So much is going on and I’ve been traveling so much that I’m going to put my lack-of-blogging guilt on hold until the start of January. So, before I exit stage left, some questions that I’ll be pondering while I’m away and hope to dive into after the first of the year:

In music, when does a cover become a standard? I’m obsessed with artists covering the famous songs of other artists (see my post on “Rainbow Connection” from a few months back for a bit more on this), but at some point the dialog between different versions fades away and what is left is a standard.  This is the difference between Elvis singing The Beatles’ “Yesterday” onstage in Hawaii and anybody singing “Happy Birthday to You.” When does that transition between cover and standard start?

Why do we digital folk believe so intensely in the wisdom of crowds? Historically speaking, mob rule has rarely worked out well, so why do we as a new media culture accept prima facie that groups of people are smarter? Perhaps I just need to drill down more into this work, but I worry that we’re not making enough of a distinction among different kinds of groups.

How long until somebody makes it easy to cross the last 10 feet between the computer and the television? It’s the killer app that I’ve been waiting for.  Last night, I watched an episode of (guilty pleasure alert) “October Road” on ABC.com and enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it MORE on my couch watching it on the big screen. Why can’t somebody do this for me? (See the first chapter of Henry Jenkins “Convergence Culture” for a longer and more articulate version of this whine.)  In the first dotcom bubble (what Community Connect CEO Ben Sun wittily refers to as the “dotpocalypse”) the big question was “the last mile,” but now we’ve whittled this down to 10 feet. For more on this, see an article I wrote for iMedia Connection.

How do we create eventness in media consumption? More and more, the media we watch is masturbatory– consumed alone in a dark room. Simply watching an episode of “30 Rock” with my wife sitting next to me is a better experience by orders of magnitude than sitting by myself and watching the best performance of anything else ever. Her presence enlivens the experience in all sorts of ways (see Daniel Goleman’s recent best seller “Social Intelligence” for some of why this is). How do media people help their audiences to create this sort of experience, and are media people even equipped to think about this in a useful way?

How is it that nobody has called NBCU head Jeff Zucker on his bull***t? In a recent talk, Zucker said of the prices that new media consumption of his programming brings in relative to broadcast dollars, “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.”  The way he phrased the question speaks volumes: it leaves all the agency on NBCU’s side… as if the media monolith HAS A CHOICE in the matter.  Dude, this is SO not up to you. The dollars are going away and the only money that is going to be left on the table can be counted in pennies. The bad news is that a lot of fatcat big media lifestyles are going to change. But maybe in the coming shakeout we’ll see rise of what I’ve been calling “the artistic middle class.” All that being said, I’m a big fan of Hulu, but see the last 10 feet question above.

And with that, I’m off… happy holidays to everybody, and thanks so much for reading Mediavorous.

Both culturally and on an entertainment-industry wide basis, we’re seeing a tectonic change in how Americans consume movies and how many movies the ticket-buying public can support over the course of a year. By taking a look only at the total box office numbers, Bart betrays a provincial perspective, which is surprising from a guy who usually has such a holistic take on the movie business.

Mass culture isn’t going away anytime soon, but it is definitely on a diet. Variety uses Nielsen EDI numbers in its regular reporting on box office numbers, but the problem with Nielsen EDI is that it tracks total revenue rather than number of tickets sold, and that bleeds away any holistic sense of how audience behavior is changing. I tend to look at Box Office Mojo, which does track tickets sold.

It’s a few weeks old, but the PowerPoint deck that I presented at iMedia’s Entertainment Summit gives a nice data overview of how things are changing. You can download it here.

There’s both bad and good news.

The bad news is that the number of opportunities for movie-theater eventness are shrinking, and as the big-industrial movie studio model shrinks we’re going to see a lot of people who are committed to that model lose their jobs as making, marketing and distributing movies becomes less and less cost effective.

So what’s the good news? Given how comparatively cheap digital filmmaking and distribution are, we are looking at some exciting potential: within the next few years we will, I think, see the emergence of an artistic middle class. While there are fewer opportunities for people to become sickeningly rich as the makers of culture (movies, TV, music, books, paintings, etc.), there are more and more opportunities for folks to make a nice living as artists.

But it’s hard to see this potential through the gauzy distractions of the Big Media American Dream where you write that book, that song, that script and are set up for the rest of your life. That dream will still be a reality for some folks, but the number is shrinking. There’s a new dream out there, where you can make videos or music for a living, have that be your full time job, never make it to the big time and still afford a house with a yard and private school for your kids. It’s a new dream worth pursuing, and one that we as a culture should start to make a real topic within our discourse.

The Big Media entertainment industry is set up with a lot of highly paid executives who are talented at getting mass audiences to consume the same products all over the world. But mass culture as a pervasive and fascinating phenomenon has already seen its best days–we’re returning to the kind of local culture that keeps folklorists and ethnographers in business.

If your dream is to drive a Bentley and live in a mansion in Beverly Hills, well, good luck.

But if your dream is to support yourself and your family as an artist and you’re comfortable with a Honda and a nice house in the suburbs, then your future may be a bright one.