OFF BEAT: 'Hobbit' ruled a Warner Bros. trademark
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Though hobbits may be a real species, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. holds the name’s trademark, a federal appellate court has ruled.
In a lawsuit Warner Bros. filed last December against Global Asylum Inc. over a knock-off film about the creatures, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 30 affirmed a U.S. District Court ruling that held Asylum was infringing on Warner Bros.’ ownership of the rights to characters created by novelist J.R.R. Tolkien.
A federal judge last fall had issued a temporary restraining order and, later, a preliminary injunction over Asylum’s use of the “Hobbit” name after determining that Warner Bros. had demonstrated a likelihood that it would suffer irreparable financial harm by confused movie-goers.
Asylum had appealed, seeking to lift the injunction. It claimed that its characters in the “Age of the Hobbits” were based on members of the real species Homo floresiensis, not Tolkien’s fantasy hobbit characters. The film studio, known for its spoof films, claimed that it had the right to “fair use” of the characters.
“The district court did not apply an erroneous legal standard in rejecting Asylum’s nominative fair use defense,” the court ruled. “Asylum argues that the characters in its movie are based on members of the real species Homo floresiensis, and that its characters are not Tolkien’s fantasy hobbit characters, the Studios’ product. Asylum contends that members of the species homo florensiensis were nicknamed “Hobbits” by scientists and journalists in reference to Tolkien’s characters. The district court properly recognized that a nominative fair use defense is not available because Asylum used the ‘Hobbit’ mark in the title Age of the Hobbits to refer to Asylum’s product and not the Studios’ product.”
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