Are board game production rights different from those for videogame production rights?
If someone made a game about Spiderman for the computer... do they have the same rights to make a boardgame or is that a different license? I'm assuming different but I'm not sure. And if a company is defunct how does that affect it's rights to all it's properties? Are they common property or do they reflect back to the designer?
Could someone who is well versed in this advise me or perhaps if they could direct me to an appropriate website or library reference. Please and thaks.
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a lawyer and that this does not constitute legal advice.
The rights to intellectual properties will vary depending on who holds the rights, when the rights were exerted, when the source material was first made public and a variety of other factors.
In this case (especially since the SpiderMan franchise is a widely recognized and deeply licensed property) I would say thatt he VG rights are exclusive of the board game rights. That doesn't mean that a designer or publisher couldn't negotiate the rights to both. But if you don't have a contract that specifically states that you ahve the license for both, then I wouldn't assume that you do.
When you ask about a company going defunct, it depends on the company's ownership of the rights. Many times, the rights to intellectual property will reside with the author or originator depending on the medium. Those rights are typically held for the length of their life plus more (I'm not sure about specific times, but it's a LONG time). However, that only applies to properties first published after (I think it's) 1921. Pre-1921 material will fall into the public domain at a point depending on when it was first published (I tink just about everything published before then is in the public domain).
Even still, it can be very tricky since other parties may try to exert a claim to the rights of various properties or, alternatively, the deceased owner of the rights may transfer those right to an estate (as Tolkien did with the Lord of the Ring properties) whose function it is to manage and license the properties.
If a company owns rights to intellectual property, then it may get more complicated when that company is dissolved. You will want to find a competent attorney that is licensed to practice this kind of law in your area and run the specifics past him.