International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI)’s chairman, Bruce Lehman, and senior Board member, Ralph Oman, have weighed in at the United States Supreme Court in support of the heirs of author and cartoonist, Jack Kirby, who created some of the most famous comic book characters and storylines of the 20th century, including The Hulk,The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four.

Lehman, a former USPTO Director and Oman, former US Register of Copyrights, worked together in the 1970s as lawyers for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees drafting the 1976 Copyright Act. They asked the high court to grant the certiorari petition of Kirby’s four children seeking review and reversal of a Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court decision that stripped the Kirbys of a right to rescind previous transfers of copyrights to their father’s publisher, Marvel Comics. The so-called “termination right” permits authors and their heirs to take back previously transferred copyrights for the additional 19 years of copyright term Congress provided in the 1976 Act.

In their brief Lehman and Oman reviewed over 70 years of judicial precedent and legislative history and concluded that the Second Circuit had disregarded the definition of “employer” as “it was universally understood at the time Jack Kirby created works in question” and rendered “meaningless the termination right established for the benefit of freelance authors and artists” under the 1976 Act.