Talk:Mercury Man

Mercury Man character is not public domain
I need you to remove or reclassify one of your pages. The character "Mercury Man" is not in the public domain. A friend and I purchased the rights to the character from Charlton in 1987 and the following year we reprinted his two stories from Space Adventures, including a copyright notice. We owned MercuryMan.com from roughly 1998 until this month, when we sold the character rights and domain name at auction to Spiderwood Studios. The website contained our copyright notice for more than 10 years until it was revised by the new owner a few weeks ago.

Thank you for your attention. Please confirm receipt of this letter.

Craig Fuqua

Plano TX

Craig thanks for bringing this to our attention, but his first appearance in Space Adventures #44 has improper copyright notice which according to copyright law any works that have an improper or missing copyright notice publish between 1923-1977 became public domain upon publication. Also even if that notice were correct, there is also the matter of no record of renewal with the copyright office for any issue of Space Adventures which was required 28 years after first publication for works published between 1923-1964. So sadly when you purchased the rights to the character in 1987 the copyright had already lapsed. I can add a disclaimer to the page which would present the information you have told me here, but even if you might not agree with it all of the paper work seems to point to Mercury Man being public domain. Thankfully for you though any derivative works that you have created featuring Mercury Man would be copyright protected, but the original version is public domain and free for anyone to use. I've provided links below to back up the information I have given here so feel free to look them over.

Links:
 * Copyright Office Records for Space Adventures
 * Explanation of Copyright Notices from the Copyright Office
 * Improper copyright notice for Space Adventures #44

Your assertion that the copyright notice was improper or expired is your personal opinion, not a matter of legal record. Your source is yourself, and it doesn't matter if anyone else agrees unless that person is a judge. Please remove all statements that the character is in the public domain.

Your assertion that the copyright notice was proper or not expired is your personal opinion, not a matter of legal record. Your source is yourself, and it doesn't matter if anyone else agrees unless that person is a judge (and a judge won't agree with you because similar cases have been taken to judges and people like you with false copyright claims to public domain works have lost). Please stop acting like you own the internet and can dictate what gets posted where. You got scammed, paid for a character that didn't need to be paid for, and have to live with that. Peace.Cebr1979 (talk) 19:38, May 10, 2014 (UTC)