The Artful Jurist

Media giant Disney has announced it's acquiring Marvel Entertainment for a reported $4 billion. What's particularly significant about that—at least from an artistic property perspective—is that it means Disney will be acquiring about 5,000 characters, including the likes of Spiderman, Iron Man, and X-Men.

Ordinarily, characters fall into a kind of gray area when it comes to copyright. It's hard to claim that you have exclusive rights to a particular character with particular characteristics when those characteristics are rather ordinary. But comic book characters possess copyrightable characteristics far beyond the mere mortal character. For that reason, the specific look and traits of a comic book character are often deemed to be copyright protected intellectual property. And that makes those characters sellable property.