While CBS will be getting a robust and sprawling Web media operation in its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, in my mind there are two chief reasons for the deal:

- News.com

- TV.com

It just about begins and ends there. Both those sites — or, more properly, their browser addresses — make synergistic sense under CBS’ umbrella. Everything else — the long-established audiences, the physical Silicon Valley hub — is incidental, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see chunks of CNET eventually get jettisoned by the new corporate parent.

CNET has occupied that valuable news.com URL real estate for more than a decade. I always thought it was peculiar that such a fundamental brand/concept should take you to a narrow slice of news, instead of a more-general news portal; but that’s CNET’s reward for cornering that domain so early. Having news.com resolve to CBS News would confer an almost default status to the network for online news consumption, simply by virtue of the easily-input Web address.

Meanwhile, the TV.com domain came under CNET’s control more recently. Just nurturing its existing community-building formula will pay off for the short term; further out, it could be used to cement CBS’ position in televised media even further.

Yes, I’m characterizing this deal as essentially another dollars-for-domains transaction. Unlike other instances, though, this one actually makes sense. There’s no other way to establish the kind of mindshare that two dead-simple dot-com addresses bring. Having these two roads lead to CBS online properties will count big, with overall brand-building and online revenue generation via ads and other channels.

If you’re packing a Y-chromosome, you’re (almost literally) a marked man lately, because there’s a gender divide characterizing the onset of this softening economy:

From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not.

What’s going on? Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care.

Based on this trending, it might be time for us guys to get in touch with our feminine sides — purely for vocational reasons.

There are two ways of looking at Cablevision’s $650 million purchase of Newsday from Tribune Co.:

1. Underlying the apparent mismatch between a dominant cable provider and an entrenched but struggling newspaper is a potentially lucrative synergy:

But even if the prospective deal has an element of vanity to it, Cablevision could make the following argument. It has roughly three million cable subscribers in Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, while Newsday has about 300,000 subscribers. Cablevision’s customer relationships could help it sell more subscriptions, while overlapping ad sales forces at the two companies could result in cost savings. And Cablevision owns a 24-hour local news channel in Long Island, which could use the news gathering capacity of Newsday — and in theory cut costs.

This makes the acquisition of Newsday the equivalent of securing an established and dedicated advertising channel for Cablevision. Nassau County is prime demographic territory, so any additional inroads a media company can make and present to ad clients is extremely valuable.

2. In order to extract the maximum value out of its unwanted asset, Tribune owner Sam Zell orchestrated an elaborate competition among Newsday’s suitors:

The trick was for Zell to turn this into a bidding war. That was difficult at first. The three interested parties acted as if they had the upper hand. Cablevision did some tire kicking, but the Dolans didn’t make an offer. [New York Daily News owner Mort] Zuckerman reportedly made a lowball bid.

Zell turned up the heat by entering into negotiations with News Corp. to accept $580 million for a majority stake in Newsday. [Rupert] Murdoch clearly felt he had the inside track. He began courting Long Island’s political leaders whose support he would surely need to get the deal approved by the FCC in Washington. That’s because News Corp. already owns the [New York] Post and two New York City television stations.

It now appears Zell was using News Corp.’s offer to establish a floor for the bidding. Zuckerman soon matched News Corp.’s offer. Then Cablevision did what non-strategic bidders often do in such situations. It offered to pay a higher price than either newspaper publisher.

And viola, Newsday becomes a hot property. Where it goes from here under the Dolans’ stewardship remains to be seen.

The general fixation on whether or not the economy’s in recession overlooks one key element: Just what metrics are being used to define “recession”, and if they’re correct.

Ignorance about recessions has taken hold because of a simplistic idea that a recession is two successive quarterly declines in gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation’s output.

The idea originated in a 1974 New York Times article by Julius Shiskin, who provided a laundry list of recession-spotting rules of thumb, including two down quarters of GDP. Over the years the rest of his rules somehow dropped away, leaving behind only “two down quarters of GDP.”

Like most rules of thumb, it’s far from perfect. It failed in the 2001 recession, for example. At the time and until July 2002, data showed just one down quarter of GDP, leading policy makers to claim there had been no recession. Yet, later that month, revisions showed GDP down for three straight quarters. Complicating matters further, with the benefit of time, we now know that GDP actually zigzagged between negative and positive readings, never showing two negative quarters in a row.

The far more important issue in 2001 was the loss of 2.7 million jobs - more than in any postwar recession. Even taking into account labor force growth, those job losses were greater than in most recessions over the past 50 years.

Shorthand tags for labeling economic conditions seem to have more to do with spin control than anything else. Fact is, the Bush administration is loathe to “officially” declare a recession on its watch because it’s such a black eye; and so it’ll tweak the numbers just enough to avoid the obvious. That sustains itself on Wall Street, where ever more media-conscious analysts play along with the blind-man’s game because there’s been no “official” pronouncement. All pretty foolish, but that’s the mechanism at play these days.

All told, if I were to go with a rule of thumb for describing the economy, I’ll stick with Harry Truman’s succinct and distinct delineation between “recession” and “depression”. Frankly, it’s much more apt than the other nonsense.

It used to be that executive-level businesswomen had to kiss the corporate world goodbye once they embarked upon the mommytrack. But the Internet, outsourcing, and networking have combined to offer up new opportunities for SWAT (”Smart Women with Available Time”) teams, made up of at-home ex-professionals being tapped to work on temporary business-development projects.

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

That “work cheap” part is not exactly music to my ears, since I swim in a lot of these same waters nowadays. As always, it’s a matter of finding a value-add service to offer clients; still, I’m not thrilled about dealing with the undercutting of rates.

Gee, what a surprise. It looks like R.H. Donnelly’s $350-million purchase of Business.com last year has run aground, as both the company’s value and the acquisition’s accompanying talent have evaporated.

In the past year, its shares have plunged 95% on worries about the company’s hefty debt-load, a softening economy, and investor worry about whether the door-stopping printed directories it has gobbled up are going the way of the drive-in movie theater or the eight-track player (a familiar refrain these days).

But we’re not here to praise or bury the phone book. Rather, what caught my eye was the recent departure of Jake Winebaum as the head of Donnelly’s Internet efforts that are aimed at preventing precisely those worries from coming to pass.

Last summer, Winebaum and his backers sold Business.com, a company they founded at the height of the dot.com boom, to Donnelly for the handsome sum of $345 million in cash. As part of that deal, Winebaum agreed to take on the role as Donnelly’s chief Internet guru. At that time, in August, Donnelly was worth more than $3 billion. Today, the whole company’s market cap is worth less than what it paid for Business.com - $338 million at Thursday’s close of $4.91. Ouch.

Fortune editor Richard Siklos wonders if he’s the only one who’s got an irrational fascination with the kind of heat that Business.com attracts. It’s true, the main attraction is the dollar figures that have been attached to it: First $7.5 million a decade ago for nothing but the URL, and then this 9-figure sum for… Well, still not much more than the URL. It’s a rare scam that ever pays off so handsomely, so consistently.

I can’t wait to see what the next purchase price for this domain name will be, probably only a couple of years from now. Will the next headline trumpet a “Billion-Dollar Business.com”? If that’s too rich for your blood, then you can opt to do “bidness” for a relative bargain instead.

Further evidence that the 20-something MySpace generation has no shame: Disclosing annual salary among friends is now considered practically de rigueur.

For people old enough to remember phone booths, a blunt reference to salary in a social setting still represents the height of bad manners. But for many young professionals, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell etiquette of previous generations seems like a relic.

For them, salary information is now fair game, at least among friends. Many consider it crucial to prosper in an increasingly transient, winner-take-all workplace — regardless of the envy that full disclosure can raise. Besides, when the Internet already offers a cornucopia of personal information, it almost seems coy to keep personal income private.

As Ilana Arazie, 32, an online video producer for a media company in Manhattan, said, “If we can talk about how many orgasms we have with our mate, why can’t we discuss how much we make?”

Well, if you bring orgasms into, okay then.

Actually, I was joking about that “no shame” quip (mostly). I don’t disagree with this sharing concept, simply because it’s a rightly-recognized acknowledgment of modern-day working life:

Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell, said that an open flow of information is deemed crucial by young professionals who think of themselves as free agents, not company men.

“People move between jobs a lot more now than they used to,” Dr. Frank said. This mobility alone increases the instances that salary might come up among friends.

Indeed, no one should expect to stick around with a single company for their entire career, simply because the companies themselves don’t even tacitly offer that security anymore. I argued 10 years ago about that fundamental shift in American life; we’re all free agents these days, like it or not. So there’s nothing wrong with collaboratively comparing notes, in order to establish a market value among peers.

Does this mean I freely cough up my gross/net earnings? Well, no. For one thing, at 36, I’m old enough to cling to the oldschool taboo on the subject. For another, now that I’m a full-time consultant, my annual “salary” can vary, especially with the of-late recessionary rumblings. It’s a bit moot, as I don’t detect any requests from friends and colleagues for that information anyway (nor do they offer up theirs). If anything, I’ll more-or-less let my visible standards of living speak for themselves, and let those curious enough guess at the pricetags and do the resultant math.

A pretty clear tipping point in communications and media growth is an industry shift from time/unit-rate to flat-rate billing. The growth of the Web, for instance, really exploded once America Online, the dominant ISP of the mid-1990s, phased out per-minute dialup access plans in favor of an unlimited monthly flat-rate subscription fee (the model most of us still have for today’s broadband connections). The lifting of the built-in restrictions that a la carte pricing forces creates a more ubiquitous all-access service, one that users more tightly weave into their everyday lives.

It’s taken a while, but that offering concept is finally creeping into the wireless phone industry with unlimited talk and data plans, playing off consumer tendencies:

“Consumers avoid these services because they want to know how much they’ll pay at the end of each month,” says Jeff Kagan, a Marietta, Ga.-based telecom analyst. “No longer fearing extra costs, of any kind, is going to drive real change in the marketplace.”

That’s something that’s proved often: Price predictability. Consumers won’t necessarily balk at a set monthly charge, even if it’s inflated. But a variable charge causes anxiety, even if it’s affordable — it’s irrational, but a line item that “flashes” on the monthly household bills scares people away. Removing that factor also removes a psychological barrier, leading to unfettered usage.

It’s still a work in progress. For me, an unlimited plan doesn’t make much sense, as I never get even remotely close to my base-package of monthly minutes right now. I would counterbalance that with extremely heavy data use, mainly plain old Web access; but doing so on the existing handset interfaces doesn’t appeal to me. There’s always the iPhone option, but probably not for another couple of years.

What’s the longer-term prospects of this industry shift? Will players like Blackberry become superfluous when everyone’s personal communications hub meets all accessing needs? Will everyone obsessively check their email, MySpace/Facebook pages, etc. on the go? Would this lead to a more-rapid phasing out of all wired Web setups (at least in residential settings)? For now, price predictability means usage unpredictability.

This shouldn’t be too surprising: In order to get out from under in the face of foreclosures/repossessions, people are putting the torch to their no-longer-affordable houses and cars:

Last week, a Sacramento-area couple were arrested on allegations that they burned their Jeep and drove their Nissan pickup into a river, then filed fraudulent insurance claims. According to investigators, the wife admitted she was trying to escape her $600 monthly car payment.

On April 1, police arrested a woman in Easley, S.C., accused of deliberately setting fire to her home just three days after the bank hung a foreclosure notice on her door. And in January, an Omaha man was arrested on suspicion of arranging to have his three-bedroom house burned down as he was facing foreclosure.

So this sort of turns the traditional rite of passage in burning a paid-off mortgage on its head. Although I’d argue it’s just as a much a rite of passage, albeit not as satisfying of one.

Regime change in the name of commerce hasn’t been (and, to this day, isn’t) limited to that black liquid found in the Middle East. Peter Chapman’s “Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World” goes deep into the United Fruit Company’s economic and political dominance in Central America during the early 20th Century, which included familiar corporatist tactics:

In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!…

It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers, pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.

Equating yesteryear’s interventionist actions with today’s blood-for-oil foreign policy certainly puts things into perspective. I’m sure the history of United Fruit (today Chiquita Brands) is far from common knowledge, even though it should be as a watershed moment in CIA influence (i.e., the Guatemala coup in 1954).

But it’s important to look at this more comprehensively. It’s not just isolated one-off actions that jump from one corner of the globe to another — global interests by American-based corporations are the drivers for Washington’s foreign policy. This isn’t new, either for the U.S. nor other world powers past and present. If more people kept themselves informed, maybe the periodic jingoistic war rallying would fizzle out.

American retail isn’t accustomed to having most in-store customers dicker over the number on an item’s pricetag. But now that both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have reported on Web-researching consumers attempting (and succeeding) in talking down the price on in-store items ranging from HDTVs to jeans, I’m sure the trend will only accelerate.

A big part of it is stigma: The past couple of generations equated the art of haggling with the art of being cheap. Generally, it’s been the marked price, take it or leave it. The leveling power of ecommerce (notably eBay’s auction system, although I think it’s more the overall volume discounting that Amazon and others have perfected) have gone a long way toward erasing the negative association. A softening economy is the other ingredient.

I’m not sure I’ve got the gumption or the patience to partake. Part of the convenience of going to a brick-and-mortar outlet is the ability to purchase the item and walk out with it — no delays due to shipping or bidding action. Standing around trying to talk down some semi-interested salesperson only prolongs the process. If it’s a big-ticket item (let’s say nearly a grand and up), then maybe. Otherwise, I don’t see doing it.

Don’t look now, but our petroleum imports may someday have a Portuguese accent attached to them:

[Brazil oil ministry head Haroldo] Lima told reporters that Petrobras “may have discovered a huge petroleum field that could contain reserves large as 33 billion barrels,” amounting to the world’s third-largest reserve, according to his spokesman, Luiz Fernando Manso.

Manso did not provide any details about where Lima got his information, except to say it came from “nonofficial, non-confirmed sources.” Brazil Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao declined comment.

Lima’s agency regulates Brazil’s oil industry, and his comments appeared to represent confirmation of what experts have long suspected: That extremely deep exploration areas hundreds of miles (kilometers) off the nation’s coast may hold potentially huge reserves.

Brazil’s current proven oil reserves are 11.8 billion barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Department. The U.S. has 21.8 billion barrels in proven reserves.

“You’re talking about a reserve the size of total U.S. reserves,” said Tim Evans, an analyst with Citigroup Inc. in New York. “It’s a big, big number.”

If this proves out, it means a new geopolitical dance is about to begin, with South America being the stage. And OPEC’s flirting with Brazil for membership will only intensify.

A well-recognized scenario from the subprime lending meltdown: The property owner rents out the acquired residence, looking at this income to wholly or partially cover the mortgage payments. But when that doesn’t work out and the bank forecloses, the renters left behind can linger for years before the eviction notice arrives.

Foreclosures can have an impact on tenants in lots of ways, but there are two sets of problems that most will face. The first and most daunting is eviction. The second is a loss of services, which can mean anything from having to fix your own clogged pipes to losing heat in the winter.

Luis Matute moved into a two-bedroom railroad apartment at the top of a walk-up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 13 years ago. Five years later, Nelva Muy joined him when they were married. Now, the couple, who are from Ecuador, and their 6-year-old son, Jinson, live in the same apartment, which has become plagued with cracks and leaks.

Two years ago, the person who collected the rent every month stopped showing up. Mr. Matute and Ms. Muy have not paid rent since, though they have been saving their rent money of $575 a month.

I’m no legal expert, but the situations described in the article — where landlords disappear and the tenants wind up living rent-free for years — make me wonder if a case for squatters rights doesn’t apply.

It can be pretty hard to establish those rights, as they have to be based upon “adverse possession” criteria, and technically a tenant agreement precludes that. But when the residents wind up being responsible for the upkeep on the property — making significant structural repairs — that indicates a shift in responsibility for an abandoned property. Indeed, it’s preferable for neighborhoods and cities to have these houses occupied by actual residents, versus having them cleared out and then vulnerable to transients and crackheads breaking in (which has happened in other foreclosure-hit areas of the U.S.).

True, the foreclosing bank gets ownership when the landlord bails, so such properties technically don’t slide into a legal limbo. But banks are notorious for neglecting their foreclosed houses — they generally don’t want the headache, they just want a monetary return on their bad investments. I’d imagine they would sign off on a squatter solution if they were given a minimal payment to simply walk away; that’s something that governmental assistance could facilitate.

The missing ingredient here is tenure. Most adverse possession laws, including that for New York, set a lengthy time period for squatters rights to kick in — something like 12 years. It’s highly unlikely that real estate of even minimal value would sit that long without the titleholder expressing the token efforts it would require (or more) to keep a stake in defensible ownership rights.

Much as my first Jelly session was photographed and Flickr’d, this past Friday’s Jellyness was video-recorded and Viddler’d.

Viddler‘d? Yes. Just watch:

Somewhere around the midway point of this compilation, you’ll see yours truly, wearing a green-and-white long-sleeved tshirt. I consciously decided to dress down this time, as I felt I stuck out last time in my shirt and tie. It helped that I made Jelly the main event of that Friday. The wardrobe choice came back to bite me late in the day, when I had to make a last-minute face-to-face meeting, but little (if any) harm done.

You’ll also notice me brandishing my XO Laptop, that I said I’d bring. Despite the oohs and ahs, no one was interested enough in the little Linux box to actually crack it open. I had figured as much beforehand.

Unfortunately, the videocamera (which was, in fact, one of those super-cool Flips) didn’t capture my triumphant snag-free upgrade of WordPress 2.5 onto PopulationStatistic.com. Good thing I blogged about it, right?

I had to leave around 1:30, after spending the better part of the morning at House 2.0. So I didn’t get to participate in the Wii gamebreak, nor the wrap-up potluck dinner. I believe the next Jelly is coming up in a couple of weeks, so maybe I’ll stick around for the extracurriculars then.

So far this year, there’s been little action on the initial public offering market for Web/tech companies, and it’s bugging the heck out of venture capitalists, who claim that that’s bad for the overall economy:

Entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, but they will need more than that in the current market. Many tech companies live and die by venture capital funding, and venture capitalists need an exit strategy. The current IPO market is not much of one, and the chances for buyouts by other companies may become slimmer in the current credit environment. Lack of exit options keeps VCs in deals longer, which increases their own risk and makes them less likely to fund other promising ventures.

Actually, I don’t think the buyout market is that bad, even with tightening credit. There’s always stock deals, that can turn out to be much more lucrative in the long run. Combine that with the prospect of continuing work as part of a larger-but-simpatico company, and most up-and-coming tech entrepreneurs happily will opt for being acquired over playing a high-finance money game.

We’ve already seen how strategizing for eventual buyouts by the Googles and Microsofts of the world has changed the rules for valuations in tech startups, and now that dynamic is impacting the established investment procedure for VCs. The old money guys are just mad that they’re being left out of the action now.

Posting this from today’s Jelly co-working gathering in midtown Manhattan, which I said I’d attend. Go figure that I’d actually follow through.

Maybe I should make a point to hit this joint every time it’s held. Because something rubbed off today, and I was able to upgrade this blog to the brand-new WordPress 2.5 without a hitch! That’s the first time I’ve ever been able to upgrade WP on this site and not have something explode. Today, I followed the upload-and-overwrite instructions, and somehow it all worked.

At least as far as I can tell. Little things may need tweaking; I’ve already had to adjust the plugins. I may or may not play with the new tagging feature (highly touted for this release, but I can take it or leave it — for now). And as usual, I had to disable the fool default-login aspect of the commenting feature (something I’d really love to hear justified by the WP developers, because I don’t see the point of it). But the rendering on the site looks good, with proper permanlinks and everything, so that’s my chief concern.

This is something of a milestone for me. I feel like going out and getting tore up to celebrate! Well, maybe just a cocktail or two, at least.

I care not for jelly — neither the spreadable stuff nor the British version of Jello.

But I guess I like Jelly well enough, because I’ll be at the coworking space in midtown this Friday. I’m anticipating attending for a couple of hours in the morning, probably checking out around noon.

I’m not planning on a repeat performance of liveblogging, like I did at last month’s Manhattan gathering. I expect most of my time will be occupied with blog housekeeping, specifically updating this site to the latest and greatest version of WordPress (currently 2.5). Since my past experiences with the supposedly simple upgrade have always been bumpy, I figure I should take advantage of Jelly’s heavy contingent of tech-heads as a go-to help resource. I’m crossing my fingers.

I’m also considering bringing along my XO Laptop, just to show it off to anyone interested. I don’t think there are that many floating around in the U.S., so it’d be a novelty. That doesn’t exactly fit under the working-time concept for Jelly, but what the heck.

Are the logos above twins? Apparently, they are to Steve Jobs: Apple Inc. is suing New York City to prevent its eco-friendly GreeNYC campaign from using an apple symbol, contending it’s too similar to the computermaker’s mark.

I’m usually sensitive to even a whiff of intellectual property infringement, as most people seem willfully ignorant on the very concept of look-and-feel mimicry. But I have to say, I don’t see much merit in Apple’s suit here. The “infinity apple” design obviously looks like an apple, as intended; but I think the resemblance to the home of the iPod ends there. There are enough points of distinction between the two images that it’s hard to see confusion widely setting in.

Plus, consider the context here: New Yorkers are used to seeing Big Apple messaging all the time. If the GreeNYC ads were somehow to roll out in other parts of the country, I might see the concern. But since that’s not going to happen, and the City audience can distinguish between the two apple-themed concepts, I don’t see a problem.

Less seriously, this could be a signal that Apple is getting ready to unveil some sort of environmentally-optimized gadget, and were prepping a green apple logo of their own. Under-ripened marketing, perhaps.

Pondering: If some TV exec dreamed up a new reality series centered around a strip club, would the resultant marketing come up with the term “Realititty Television”?

It seems like a natural — even if the featured titties wouldn’t be.

Think such a concept would never fly, either with the TV industry or the nudie club business? I beg to differ. On the television side, this hardly scrapes the bottom of the reality barrel, and the surefire ratings from featuring nekkid women (even with the naughty bits pixelated out), aided by the built-in controversy it would attract, would dismiss any objections. As for the “gentlemen’s clubs”, the increasingly corporate nature of the business means they’d welcome the exposure (no pun intended — mostly).

I’m sure many a corporate notebook-computing jockey is tittering over the idea of “going topless” — with “topless” in this case meaning laptop-less, referring to an effort among Silicon Valley companies to make face-to-face meetings more productive via elimination of distracting portable monitors.

And actually, since I just used the suggestive “tittering” when describing a term suggestive of exposed breasts, I guess I’m part of the problem.

But at least I’m not part of this problem:

It’s not exactly attention deficit. Linda Stone, a software executive who worked for Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp., calls it “continuous partial attention.” It stems from an intense desire to connect and be connected all of the time, or, in her words, to be “a live node on the network.”

Etiquette has suffered in the process. “Face-to-face meetings have become a low priority because they’re constantly being interrupted by technology, and many people can’t figure out what to do,” said Sue Fox, author of “Business Etiquette for Dummies.” “What’s more important — the gadget or the person, or people, you’re with?”

I’ve said before that we live in the Age of Distraction. Having an interactive source of constant distraction in your pocket makes it official.

In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster got $130 (roughly $1,800 in today’s dollars, per this historical inflation calculator) in exchange for selling all rights to a little character by the name of Superman.

Seventy years later, their heirs have legally reclaimed part of the copyright to the world’s more famous (and marketable) superhero, potentially complicating Time Warner’s use of the character in films and other media.

Compensation to the Siegels would be limited to any work created after their 1999 termination date. Income from the 1978 “Superman” film, or the three sequels that followed in the 1980s, are not at issue. But a “Superman Returns” sequel being planned with the filmmaker Bryan Singer (who has also directed “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men”) might require payments to the Siegels, should they prevail in a demand that the studio’s income, not just that of the comics unit, be subject to a court-ordered accounting.

What this recounting fails to mention: If the ruling stands, it opens a can of worms. Practically every iconic comics and pop-culture character is probably covered under this precedent: Batman, Spider-Man, Bugs Bunny and hundreds others. The intellectual property held by companies like Time Warner are consistently undervalued; a flood of legal claims not only would rightfully revert rights back to the creators and their families, it might also bring to light just how much money their creations bring to corporate bottom-lines.