I'm a comic book colorist. In our industry, legally speaking, all the artists are co-authors – the writers, illustrators, and colorists all have the same rights to the work they produce.
Typically, all of these artists sign work-for-hire contracts, which transfers all those rights to the publishers. This is how Marvel and DC make $$$$ off of their IP without having to payout royalties to large teams of creators.
Contracts are the only way to transfer legal ownership of these kinds of IP rights. You cannot hand-shake IP, you can't sell it over the phone, it's not recognized until it's on paper.
When I started working for Z2 comics, they explained to me that they weren't holding any of the rights to their books – their business model was simply acting as publisher, not a catalogue of IP. And, sure enough, book after book that I worked on, they did not require me to sign any work-for-hire contracts.
Anyway, overtime, the relationship deteriorated between myself and Z2 as a result of conflicts between myself and the (now former) CEO. We were friends before he was my client – this kind of thing happens often in the industry.
There were lots of layers to the conflict, but, professionally speaking, my biggest gripe was that I wanted to be appropriately credited for the work that I did when Z2 Comics ran ad campaigns – they were publishing my color art in Rolling Stone, Consequence, CBR, Loudwire, Bloody-Disgusting, etc etc, but intentionally withholding my name in those articles (as the CEO explained it, so that I “wouldn't get poached”).
After I parted ways with the company, I offered my IP to them so I could cut cleanly cut ties – but they passed. Instead, I sent several cease and desist notices to get them to stop using my color art in their promotional material. I was ignored.
In 2022, one of the last books I had worked on, Elvis: the Graphic Novel, was nominated for an industry award. I'd never even seen the printed book, but I figured I'd acquire some copies and help the creative team campaign for the award.
To my surprise, when I cracked it open, the Elvis book had decided to strip my name entirely from the work! All my pages were credited to another colorist, who had completed the book after I left (my original pages were, of course, untouched – the new colorist modeled their color designs after mine, to match, and they did a really good job).
This is when I got a lot more serious about understanding my rights as an IP holder, and discovered the lie-by-omission I had been told by the CEO when I originally started working for them. No, Z2 doesn't hold onto the IP rights for their books – they sell them to their third party clients. Almost every book I'd worked on had a copyright filed with the US copyright registry, all filed by the same law office.
I could have caught this at any point during my tenure coloring for the company – I knew they were shady assholes, but I didn't think they were doing fraud.
After a little arm-chair lawyer research, I think it was technically embezzlement? They had legal access to my IP (uploaded to all of their servers whenever I completed a page), but not legal ownership over it. By that metric, I determined they might be in violation of the RICO act – the State department hasn't gotten back to me about it, haha. I'm not actually expecting anything to happen there, but it felt good to file that report.
It'll never happen, but it's my fantasy to have all those third-party clients team up and sue Z2. I don't know what their contracts looked like, but none of them have work-for-hire contracts from me. I suspect the same is true for other artists.
And, before y'all tell me to talk to a lawyer – I did! He was very helpful, but I don't have the time or resources to pursue legal action.
TLDR: I expected a large comic book company to respect my rights as an artist, and they didn't (shocker). The IP I created for Z2 Comics was sold, without my knowledge, to record labels and celebrity clientele that went on to copyright my work for their own purposes.