COLORADO (Reuters) - Stan Lee Media, a company that says it controls the rights to Marvel characters including Spider Man and Iron Man, has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Colorado against the Walt Disney Co seeking “billions of dollars of profits.”
Stan Lee, no longer associated with the company, created many of Marvel’s stable of comic book characters. The company claims Lee assigned it his rights to those characters in 1998 but then agreed a month later to assign the same rights to Marvel Enterprises. Disney acquired Marvel Enterprises, which had been renamed Marvel Entertainment, in 2009 for $4.3 billion. “The Walt Disney Company has represented to the public that it, in fact, owns the copyright to these characters as well as hundreds of other characters created by Stan Lee.”