http://moviepilot.com/posts/2014/06/25/could-marvel-lose-the-avengers-in-the-supreme-court-1564587 I was wondering, would this also affect Star Trek tie-in authors, who do work for hire? Could you reclaim ownership of your creations after a while?
Anyone who thinks this Supreme Court would side with Jack Kirby's estate over Disney is nuts. Really. The current Supreme Court has a clear pro-corporation stance, which is why I'm not optimistic for tomorrow's Hobby Lobby decision. To answer your questions, no, whatever the decision is, it won't affect Star Trek novelists decades from now. The 1976 revision to the Copyright Act codified work-for-hire and created a window for a pre-1976 creator who operated under work-for-hire to reclaim the work because the 1976 act also extended copyright terms. Congress at the time recognized that the act was a giveaway for corporate IP holders, and this was a way to compensate the creators who created and worked on the corporate IPs. There isn't an option for post-1976 creators to reclaim the copyright in the same way. Plus, the last Pocket contract I saw had a fascinating paragraph that said, paraphrasing from memory here, that the author assigned CBS copyright in the work in perpetuity throughout the known universe.