> I would be very mad at the lawyer that drafted said contract.
It actually sounds like the standard contract DC use with "author-owned" material at least since Watchmen (and possibly before): creators maintain ownership of the IP, but publication/distribution rights of certain amounts of material are granted exclusively to DC - as long as such material is made available for sale.
This is famously how they locked away Watchmen: they kept reprinting the original run in paperbacks every year, so that the publication clause would never expire and Moore/Gibbons would never be able to take it elsewhere (and never be able to claim full royalties rather than a determined, reduced rate). I think there were lawsuits at some point, but the outcome was just a little more money for authors.
Willingham seems to have decided to take the nuclear option instead, by releasing the IP in the public domain. This means the already-published material will remain the preserve of DC, but anyone is supposedly free to write and publish new stories with the same characters. As others stated, it's unlikely to happen on a large scale, because of the chilling effect of potentially having to go against DC/Warner in court; but it should ensure fanfic and other creative expressions can flourish.
To be fair for Watchmen, the Watchmen deal was made at a time where paperback reprints were rare, and they obviously kept reprinting it because they genuinely wanted to make money from directly selling it, not because they were reprinting 10 copies a year just to keep the contract from expiring.
I don't think that's verifiable without receipts. I'm pretty sure at some point (late '90s) you could get such paperbacks on the secondhand market for pennies, and everyone had one already.
It actually sounds like the standard contract DC use with "author-owned" material at least since Watchmen (and possibly before): creators maintain ownership of the IP, but publication/distribution rights of certain amounts of material are granted exclusively to DC - as long as such material is made available for sale.
This is famously how they locked away Watchmen: they kept reprinting the original run in paperbacks every year, so that the publication clause would never expire and Moore/Gibbons would never be able to take it elsewhere (and never be able to claim full royalties rather than a determined, reduced rate). I think there were lawsuits at some point, but the outcome was just a little more money for authors.
Willingham seems to have decided to take the nuclear option instead, by releasing the IP in the public domain. This means the already-published material will remain the preserve of DC, but anyone is supposedly free to write and publish new stories with the same characters. As others stated, it's unlikely to happen on a large scale, because of the chilling effect of potentially having to go against DC/Warner in court; but it should ensure fanfic and other creative expressions can flourish.