IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: High court declines to determine whether a car named Eleanor has copyright protection, (Nov 12, 2025)

By Patricia K. Ruiz, J.D.

Eleanor was featured in the 1974 film Gone in 60 Seconds and its 2000 remake.

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in Carroll Shelby Licensing, Inc., v. Halicki, a lawsuit seeking to determine whether copyright protection for characters is limited to only those characters that meet a three-element test applied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The petition for certiorari had asked the Court to resolve a putative circuit split over the standard for protecting a fictional character and took the Ninth Circuit to task for imposing a requirement that a character possess “anthropomorphic” qualities in order to gain protection under the law (Halicki v. Carroll Shelby Licensing, Inc., No. 25-444 (U.S. cert. denied Oct. 14, 2025)).

Background. At the heart of this case are four films: the original 1974 movie Gone in 60 Seconds, two 1980s spinoffs—The Junkman and Deadline Auto Theft, respectively—and the blockbuster 2000 remake, also called Gone in 60 Seconds, starring Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie. While the plotline of each movie varies, they all involve a protagonist who is tasked with stealing a number of motor vehicles. In each film, one or more of the cars is a Ford Mustang that goes by the name “Eleanor.”

The lawsuit is the latest in a long series of disputes between two would-be merchandisers of Eleanor-related products. Denise Halicki owns, through various corporate entities, the copyrights to the first three films and the merchandising rights to Eleanor as it appears in the 2000 remake. After that movie’s release, a licensing company affiliated with the late race-car designer and driver Carroll Shelby licensed a custom-made Mustang that, in Halicki’s view, unlawfully copied Eleanor’s design. The parties settled their differences in 2009, but the peace did not last. Shelby began licensing custom-made Mustangs again and then, after Halicki allegedly interfered with its merchandising, sued Halicki for breach of contract and declaratory relief. Halicki, in turn, counterclaimed for breach of contract and copyright infringement.

Procedural history. The district court rejected Halicki’s breach of contract and copyright infringement claims. The court held that Eleanor was not entitled to character copyright protection and granted partial summary judgment. Subsequently, the Ninth Circuit affirmed that Eleanor was not a copyrightable character because it did not have an identifiable personality and did not have distinctive physical traits that were consistently demonstrated throughout the series. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in part the district court’s judgment, holding that, under California contract law, Shelby did not violate the parties’ settlement agreement (see IP Law Daily, May 28, 2025).

Petition for certiorari. The question presented before the U.S. Supreme Court was whether copyright protection for characters is limited to only those characters that meet the Ninth Circuit’s three-element test, or, whether copyright protects a character to the extent that it is distinctive from a generic stock character.

The petition took on the court of appeals’ decision—and by association, the three-part test the court of appeals applied—on several grounds. First, the petition noted, the court of appeals erred by asking whether Eleanor has “anthropomorphic” qualities”—a requirement the petition asserts was “invented by th[e] panel, and based on no case law or statute.” The result, the petition asserted, is “confusion and an invitation to hairsplitting and subjective parsing of whether a character is ‘human’ enough for protection.” Indeed, taken to its limit, the petition noted, no “inanimate object in a blockbuster film” can be protected, “including, for example, the distinctive Death Star or Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.”

The court of appeals also erred, the petition asserted, in concluding that Eleanor does not “display consistent, widely identifiable traits.” To be sure, the petition acknowledged, Eleanor changes appearance between films—for example, within one movie, she “begins in pristine condition, gradually incurs serious damage, and reappears at the end in the ironic guise of a fixer-upper.” But the audience “always knows when the car character on the screen is Eleanor—just as the audience of a James Bond film recognizes 007 no matter whether he wears a tuxedo or bathing suit,” the petition asserted. The court’s errant conclusion on this score, the petition argued, shows that “whether a trait is ‘consistent’ or ‘widely identifiable’ is flatly subjective, and contrary to the standard that copyright protection depends on originality.”

Finally, the petition asserted, the decision of the court of appeals “deepens a split between the Ninth Circuit’s approach to this issue and the approach of the Second, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits.” These circuits, the petition argued, hold that a character is protected by copyright “to the extent it is distinctive from a generic stock character.” This standard, the petition asserted, is “simple, predictable, and consonant with the principle of ‘originality: everything the Ninth Circuit’s standard is not.”

News: Copyright AlaskaNews ArizonaNews CaliforniaNews HawaiiNews IdahoNews MontanaNews NevadaNews OregonNews WashingtonNews GCNNews