A little advice, please!

[WMDBASSPLAYER]

Greetings fellow Machiners! I’ve been MIA for quite some time due to some personal issues. Any way, the reason for this post is I think Marvel ripped off one of my characters. While researching a subject of interest, I saw a picture of a relatively new Marvel character, Singularity. She bares a very striking resemblance to the character I created here on Hero Machine qnd called Black Hole. Even some similar powers! I never formally copyrighted any of my characters, but isn’t there some type of implied copyright of characters we create here? I can’t afford a lawyer to go against a huge company like Marvel, but some kind of acknowledgement would be nice. I’m a musician by profession and hate the legal aspects of theientertainment industry.

[Herr D]

Inevitable that there would be some of that happening sometime . . .

Well, I’m by no means an authority, but the first thing to do would be establish a timeline. For the sake of this site, regardless of whether you intend to do anything else, look up the earliest possible time their character went public. Then look up any likely coincidences (the writer, illustrator’s Facebook page says they’re from your location, likes the same restaurants, happens to like your music, etc..) Because, if you can say you’re first and wouldn’t likely have overheard someone talking in another city . . . heromachine is safe, and you might decide to call a free lawyer service to ask for whatever.

If there ARE some likely possibilities of crosstalk leading to duplicate and near-simultaneous inventions, you might enter in the post a statement declaring it coincidental and non-malicious.

If THEY were clearly first, ask a moderator to rule whether it’s too derivative or it can stay.

Personally, Marvel DOES need to be trolling us for ideas. They don’t bother to WRITE.  They just reboot so often that they wind up making some fans angry and most of us confused.

[WMDBASSPLAYER]

Thanks HerrD. I created Black Hole in March 2013. So far it looks like the Marvel character first appeared in 2015. Still got some research to do.

[JR19759]

If you want my opinion dude, unless you were actually planning to try and make money from the character, don’t do anything. Marvel can afford much better lawyers than you and as haven’t copyrighted the character, they will chew you up, spit you out and probably counter-sue and get you to take down the character. I don’t believe that digital date/ time stamps count as evidence of when something was created, as anything digital can be edited/ tampered with, so it isn’t concretely provable. But I only studied music law so I don’t know about if the same standards are applied to literary creations.

We won’t do anything in terms of removing the character, so you don’t have to worry about that.

[Author]

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