The Batmobile and Superman!

        I know that you all might be asking yourself, what exactly would I have to say about the batmobile and superman.

            We all know that a major legal issue that the comic book industry sees a lot is different copyright and trademark infringement cases. After listening to two podcast this week, each of them discussed a lot of different things that I really thought were interesting about the comic book industry. Apparently, the batmobile was trademarked and copyrighted as a character of the Batman series. In the superman case, the heirs of the creators of the famous character sue Warner Bros. for the copyrights of the character.

            The Batmobile case consists of a lawsuit between Warner Bros. and Mark Towle. This lawsuit is because Mark Towle, the owner of Gotham Garage.  His business makes replicas of cars that appear in different films, made and sold two different versions of the Batmobile. One was from the 1966 movie and the other was from the 1989 version. Warner is suing Towle for copyright and trademark infringement of the batmobile, since by law the batmobile is a copyright character and cannot be used or replicated in any form without their consent. Basically, the court ruled in favor of Warner Bros. since they own the copyrights and trademarks to all the versions of the batmobile.

            The Superman case consists of the Heirs of the creators of the Superman character and Warner Bros. In this case the heirs are asking to recover any copyrights and trademark that Warner Bros. has on the Superman character. What they mention in the podcast, that didn’t really help, the heirs was that in a previous lawsuit, they entered into two different agreements one in 1975, where the creators received $4 million. In 1992, the heirs entered in another deal and it mentioned that this would be the last and final deal with the creators or heirs hereinafter. So basically the court ruled in Warner Bros. favor, due to the 1992 agreement that all the heirs signed.