Fin Fang Foom wrote:
My feeling about this -- and I acknowledge that it might be interpreted as somewhat contradictory -- is that if there is a legal mechanism for heirs to reclaim all or part of the copyright, I take no issue with that. (That isn't how or why the law was devised --that's just how it works out, at least under certain circumstances.)

I'm not sure what you mean by this...the whole point of the copyright reversion is that under the original deal, the seller was selling the right to exploit a property for a certain period of time. When the copyright period was extended, it would be unfair to the seller for the buyer to continue profiting without further compensation, so a mechanism was created by which when the original deal should have expired (by the property going into the public domain), the seller would have the opportunity to reclaim the copyright.

So the whole point of the Kirby-Disney trial was to determine whether Kirby had ever held the copyright (thus transferring it to Marvel, under which circumstance he would be eligible to reclaim it), or whether he did his work on a for-hire basis (in which case Marvel always had the copyright, and there would be no one for it to revert to).

And the whole point of that aspect of the revised copyright law was to give creators exactly the opportunity that Kirby's heirs tried unsuccessfully to exploit (and that Siegel's heirs tried successfully to exploit, or at least somewhat successfully since it seems much of what we consider "Superman" was due to later additions by DC).