Legal News

Ninth Circuit: Creator?s Family Doesn?t Hold Copyright To Betty Boop

By Chad Bray

The family of legendary animator Max Fleischer doesn’t hold a valid copyright or trademark for cartoon character Betty Boop, which he created, a federal appeals court has ruled.

In a 2-1 decision Wednesday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that Fleischer Studios Inc. doesn’t have standing to bring a trademark infringement lawsuit against several other companies that license Betty Boop merchandise, including Avela Inc.–namely it was unable to prove the chain of how the rights to the character was transferred over the years.

You can read a Reuters story on the decision here and the decision itself here.

“If we ruled that Avela’s depictions of Betty Boop infringed Fleischer’s trademarks, the Betty Boop character would essentially never enter the public domain,” U.S. Circuit Judge J. Clifford Wallace wrote.

Max Fleischer created Betty Boop in 1930 and sold the rights to her cartoons and the character about 10 years after creating her. His family, in an attempt to revive the Fleischer cartoon business, incorporated Fleisher Studios in the early 1970s and attempted to repurchase the intellectual property rights to the character.

The decision comes as the families of other comic book and cartoon character creators seek to assert their rights to classic characters, such as Superman and the X-Men.

Marvel Entertainment, now part of Walt Disney Co., sued the heirs of Jack Kirby last year in federal court in Manhattan after his family moved to terminate Marvel’s rights to Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and other characters. That case is pending.

In 2009, the heirs of Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, recaptured limited rights to several early works that depicted Superman’s origin from Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Brothers and DC Comics.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 23, 2011 (boomark / email).