The following was posted on Lance Storm’s website:
Now the Dudleys are a whole different kettle of fish. The Dudley name was created in ECW. WWE purchased ECW, so the impression is that they now own all of ECW created ‘work for hire’ property. The interesting thing here is, not everyone in ECW was under contract. During my tenure in ECW I never signed an ECW contract, and I don’t believe the one we were constantly negotiating back and forth over, had a ‘work for hire’ clause. It may have but we were so busy debating other issues I may have missed it. If the Dudleys weren’t under contract to ECW at the time the Dudley gimmick was created, they may still own rights to it. Further more if they were under contract but didn’t have a ‘work for hire’ clause in the contract, again they may have claim to ownership. If the Dudleys did have such a clause and were under contract then I think it is completely cut and dry, WWE owns the gimmick.
Regardless of the ECW contract any variation created in WWE would still belong to WWE. The “Whazz Up?” catch phrase, and “D-Von get the tables” I believe were created in WWE and will therefore be off limits either way. There is one other interesting option I thought of the other night. I was watching the “Forever Hardcore” documentary on ECW, which is tremendous by the way, and in it Raven talks about how the Dudley gimmick was his idea. Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but the Raven character was created in ECW and Raven still used that name, so I assume he has ownership rights to it. This means one of two things. He either negotiated those rights away from ECW at some point, or more likely he was not under ECW contract at the time he started the gimmick.
So what happens if the Dudleys were under contract and Raven wasn’t? Raven creates the Dudley gimmick to be used in ECW. The Dudleys don’t own it if they are under a ‘work for hire’ type contract, but if Raven isn’t, ECW can’t lay legal claim to it either, can they? ECW wouldn’t have the rights of ownership to Raven’s ‘intellectual property’, and therefore it wouldn’t be included in the property WWE purchased. There is a possibility here that Raven could have legal claim the Dudley name, at least the original ECW version of it. If the Duds decide to fight for the name, this could get interesting, depending on what their contractual status was in ECW.
