Siegel Keaton Complete
Over at Blog@, Jeff Trexler reports that ne of his posts has been introduced as evidence in the Siegel/DC copyright lawsuit. Under examination is the post discussing a collaboration between Jerry Siegel and an artist named Russell Keaton on what appears to be an early version of Superman.

The discovery of this new material set off a heated legal exchange. DC’s lawyers challenged the Kitchen documents on several fronts, prompting Toberoff to defend Joanne Siegel’s ability to verify her husband’s signature and Denis Kitchen’s trustworthiness. DC claimed that the new material was filed too late to be considered at this point in the proceedings; the Siegels argued that DC had made a series of its own “rogue filings” with “unauthenticated evidence.”

The reason why the Siegel/Keaton material has received so much attention lies in one of the hottest issues in the comics business today: work for hire. A creator cannot use termination rights to regain ownership of material created as work made for hire, since the creator did not own the material in the first place. However, the Siegel heirs were able to regain half of the copyright in the Superman material in Action Comics #1 in part because Jerry Siegel had co-authored it before entering into the September 22, 1938 employment agreement with Detective Comics.


More in the link.