Los Angeles (dpa) – Batman comics publisher DC Comics scored a knockout punch Monday over knockoff Batmobiles, winning a legal battle in the United States’ highest court.
The US Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s decision that the bat-winged driving machine was protected by the same copyright as its crime-fighting driver.
Without so much as a POW! BAM! or THWACK! the comics publisher thus triumphed over a California auto mechanic who had been producing unauthorized replicas of the caped crusader’s car.
The ersatz Batmobiles were modeled on the superhero’s rides from the 1966 Batman television series, starring Adam West, and the 1989 Batman movie, starring Michael Keaton.
Gotham Garage owner Mark Towle had kitted out his replicas with features like “custom bat insignias, wheel bats, [and a] bat steering wheel” and sold them for as much as 90,000 dollars, according to court documents.
In September, in a ruling that cited examples from Apple computers and fictional superspy James Bond, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the futuristic, jet-black car was “sufficiently distinctive” to warrant the same copyright protection as a fictional character.
“As Batman so sagely told Robin, ‘In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential,'” the court wrote in that ruling.
