Holy auto! Court backs Batmobile copyright
Pow! Take that, anyone who makes and sells a replica of the Batmobile.
That was the message Wednesday from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The highpowered crime-fighting vehicle, first seen in a 1941 Batman comic, is a comic book “character” protected by copyright laws, the court said.
The ruling upheld a federal judge’s decision that Mark Towle, who owns Gotham Garage in Riverside County and makes and sells replicas of the autos featured in motion pictures and television, had violated the copyright held by DC Comics by selling reproductions of the Batmobile.
Towle said he sells the replica bat-
“As a copyrightable character, the Batmobile need not have a consistent appearance in every context.” Judge Sandra Ikuta
cars to avid collectors for $90,000 each and also sells kits for customers to modify their cars to look like the Batmobile in the 1966 “Batman” TV series or the 1989 movie.
The Batmobile “may be a character in a comic book or a movie or a TV show, but what my client sold was a car,” said Towle’s lawyer, Larry Zerner. “The car did not solve crimes. All it did was go forward or reverse.”
He said he would consider a further appeal.
Court’s reasoning
The appeals court said copyright laws don’t generally apply to characters who appear only in books, but comic book characters are different because they have “physical as well as conceptual qualities” and often use “unique elements of expression,” in the words of a 1954 ruling. The same holds true of characters in movies and television series, the court said.
Copyright protection can include normally inanimate objects like automobiles in comics or films, Judge Sandra Ikuta said in the 3-0 ruling.
The Batmobile has varied somewhat in appearance, Ikuta said, but typically displays bat wings on the top or back, bat emblems, a curved windshield, exaggerated fenders, and up-to-date or futuristic gadgets and weapons, all of which have made it recognizable as “Batman’s loyal bat-themed sidekick.”
She cited a judge’s 1995 ruling that found copyright protection for the James Bond character, regardless of who played him, because of distinctive traits like his strength and suavity, his “license to kill,” and his love of martinis “shaken, not stirred.”
“As a copyrightable character, the Batmobile need not have a consistent appearance in every context, so long as the character has distinctive character traits and attributes,” Ikuta said.
Warner Bros., DC Comics’ parent company, declined to comment on the ruling.
Ramifications
If the ruling stands, DC Comics or Warner Bros. would be entitled to Towle’s profits and any losses caused by his unauthorized replicas, and to a court order against further infringements. Those who put a Batmobile sticker on their car for such benign tasks as distributing food to the needy are likely to be protected by an exception in the copyright law for nonprofit activities that have no impact on the copyright holder’s revenues.
Another Warner affiliate, Warner/Chappell Music, didn’t fare as well this week with its claim of a copyright on “Happy Birthday to You,” on which it has been collecting royalties from performances for more than a decade. A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled Tuesday that the song can be performed freely, without copyright restrictions, because a company that Warner/Chappell bought in 1998 had owned exclusive rights to various arrangements of the melody but not to the lyrics.