On the eve of Halloween, a federal judge in Reading, Pa., reasserted that Stan Lee Media Inc. doesn’t own Spider-Man.
The company, referred to in court papers as SLMI, is a successor to the one that Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, had signed a contract with in 1998. About a decade later, after the Walt Disney Co. had bought Marvel Entertainment, the comic-book company that originally printed the Spider-Man stories starting in the 1960s, SLMI filed a suit claiming that it had copyright ownership of several of Lee’s characters.
