Category Archives: Batman

Superhero Corporations I: Vicarious Liability

Posted on October 12, 2011 by | 6 comments

There are several superhero characters that also happen to be executives of major corporations. Batman, as Bruce Wayne, is the head of Wayne Industries. Tony Stark runs Stark Industries. Reed Richards is in charge of the Fantastic Four’s corporate activities. The list goes on.

A question we haven’t talked about much yet is whether the activities of our heroes can cause liability for their respective corporations and vice versa. There are distinct issues here. The first is “respondeat superior” a Latin phrase meaning “Let the master answer” which is a species of vicarious liability, and “piercing the corporate veil“. The former can create liability for employers as a result of the actions of employees. The latter can create personal liability for executives and owners of a corporation for actions of the corporation. As one can see, these might be issues for our heroes. This time, we’re going to take a look at respondeat superior.

I. Basic doctrine

The basic concept here is that if an employee does something wrong while in the service of his employer, the employer is responsible even if the employer did not directly authorize the action. The most common example is if an employee is driving at the behest of his employer and gets in an accident. If the employee is still within the “course and scope” of his employment, the employer will be liable.

This may at first seem a little unfair, as what we’ve got here truly is “vicarious liability,” i.e. one person being liable for the actions of another. But there are two main justifications for the doctrine. First, if an employee is acting on behalf of his employer and screws something up, it seems a little unfair to let the employer off without any consequences. The employer certainly stood to benefit by having the employee make the trip, so it only stands to reason that they should also bear the risk of that trip. Second, a person acting on behalf of his employer has the potential to get in far, far more trouble than acting on their own. Returning to the driving example again, an eighteen-wheeler can cause vastly more damage than even a big SUV, but most people don’t use eighteen-wheelers to commute. There’s just no cause for an individual to use one of those things in most circumstances, as almost nothing a private individual might want to do requires moving that much stuff around. But businesses can and do need that kind of hauling capacity and so regularly put those vehicles on the road. The risk there is not just to other drivers, but to the owner of whatever stuff is in the trailer. Same goes for moving things around a warehouse: it’s entirely possible for a single trip with a forklift to be worth more than the employee operating it will make this year and next. So the other reason for making employers responsible for the torts of their employees is that employers (or their insurers) are the only ones likely to be able to afford to pay for said torts.

This is true even with insurance, by the way. Most personal auto carriers don’t even sell policies with limits in excess of $300,000 per person, but $1 million is pretty much the default commercial auto liability limit. And it goes up from there. Commercial excess policies with $25 million limits are pretty commonplace, but personal umbrella policies rarely go beyond $1 million.

One last thing to understand here is the distinction between corporate and personal assets. Take Tony Stark as an example. He’s the single largest shareholder in Stark Industries, so he “owns” a significant chunk of the company. But that isn’t the same thing as owning corporate assets. Stark has an interest in the company and as a shareholder has the right to vote on corporate actions. But he does not have any interest in corporate assets as such. This is part of how corporations work. So when we talk about respondeat superior, we mean that a plaintiff can sue Tony directly and potentially get his stock in the company, as those are his personal assets, but also sue the company directly, and have access to corporate assets. So depending on the size of the verdict, it’s theoretically possible for a plaintiff to wind up both owning a company and being owed a big check from the company. This isn’t likely to happen to any of the characters we’re talking about, as Wayne Industries etc. are all worth billions, but it’s not that uncommon an occurrence in small businesses with few assets.

II. Respondeat superior and superheroes

With that basic explanation of the doctrine, let’s turn our attention to whether superhero executives can create liability for their corporations. The answer here is going to be highly fact specific, turning mostly on whether or not the superhero was acting on behalf of the corporation at the time. Fortunately, our superheroes form something of a spectrum illustrating almost the entire spread of possibilities here.

On one end, we’ve got Batman. Yes, Bruce Wayne is the president and largest shareholder, and yes, he uses corporate assets to be Batman. But his activities as Batman are almost completely distinct from Wayne Industries wider corporate activities. It’s a multinational conglomerate with its fingers in almost everything, and only a tiny fraction of its resources are being redirected to Wayne for his Batman activities. More to the point, Wayne goes to some lengths to hide this from the other shareholders, who would probably vote against this sort of thing if they knew about it. Wayne Industries as such does not really stand to gain anything by Batman’s activities either, aside from the general benefit to everyone that is law and order. So in Batman’s case, it seems unlikely that what he does could subject Wayne Industries to liability, as nothing he does really seems to be within the course and scope of whatever employment he might have there.

In the middle is Iron Man. Tony Stark is the largest shareholder of Stark Industries (or something like that), and people know that he’s also Iron Man. But again, Stark Industries does a lot of things which have nothing to do with Iron Man, and Tony’s employment with the company—when he even is employed—doesn’t seem to have anything to do with being Iron Man. Granted, until he went public with his identity, Iron Man did do a lot to serve Stark Industries’ interests, e.g. protecting corporate assets, but once Stark went public, unless Stark Industries explicitly puts Iron Man on the payroll as such or explicitly puts serving as Iron Man in Tony’s job description, the case for vicarious liability is murky at best. It’s possible that it could be there, especially if Iron Man is acting in the company’s interest, but it isn’t a slam dunk case most of the time.

On the other end of the spectrum is Reed Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four, Inc. is the corporate entity that they use to sell things based on Reed’s patents and to generally fund their activities. But that’s about it. Not only is FF, Inc.’s business pretty much entirely about the Fantastic Four, but it’s mission is pretty explicitly to let them do what it is that they do. Vicarious liability should be pretty easy to establish here.

III. Conclusion

So, as we see, respondeat superior is something that at least some superheroes are going to have to worry about. Next time we’ll take a look at the flip side and piercing the corporate veil.

6 Comments

Posted in Batman, corporations, Fantastic Four, insurance, Iron Man, labor law, torts

Law and the Multiverse Mailbag III

Posted on January 14, 2011 by | 16 comments

Today we take a look at reader questions involving the Patriot Act, Bruce Wayne’s funding of Batman, and revealing superhero costumes.  As always, if you have questions or post suggestions, please send them to james@lawandthemultiverse.com and ryan@lawandthemultiverse.com or leave them in the comments.

Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Batman, criminal law, mailbag

Superheroes and Flying I: Air Safety and Registration

Posted on December 27, 2010 by | 33 comments

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are approximately 7,000 aircraft in the air over the continental US at any given time. That looks something like this. Congress has claimed sovereignty over U.S. airspace and has given authority to the Administrator of the FAA to “develop plans and policy for the use of the navigable airspace and assign by regulation or order the use of the airspace necessary to ensure the safety of aircraft and the efficient use of airspace.” 49 U.S.C. § 40103.

So what does this mean for our flying superheroes?

Continue reading →

33 Comments

Posted in administrative law, Batman, Iron Man, Superman, X-Men

“Gadget” Superheroes and Federal Arms Control Laws

Posted on December 21, 2010 by | 40 comments

At least two major superheroes, Batman and Ironman, are the alter egos of  billionaire “industrialists,” Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark respectively. Both are the at least titular heads of their respective corporate empires, Wayne Enterprises and Stark Industries. Both are major defense contractors, i.e. arms merchants. Wayne Enterprises is generally described as a multi-industry conglomerate with significant revenues in a number of unrelated businesses, while Stark Industries is primarily in the arms business, but both appear to derive a significant portion of their revenues from selling weaponry of all sorts.

This raises two interesting issues. First, how exactly do these companies get the money for these sorts of secret projects? And second, do our various heroes break any laws when they leave the country or provide this equipment to others?

I. Arms Revenue

Weapons, particularly exotic and/or large and/or expensive ones, aren’t exactly for sale at Wal-Mart. Nor are they typically sold in much volume. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, the division of Lockheed Martin responsible for the F-22 and F-35, sells somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred planes a year. Wal-Mart probably sells more items than that every second, even at 2:00AM.

That’s because Wal-Mart is selling to the consumer market, i.e. the hundreds of millions of customers their stores reach around the world. Lockheed Martin probably only has a handful of actual customers, because legal issues aside, only sovereign governments can afford to drop $150 million on a plane that seats one person, let alone a hundred of them.

In just about every comic book story, the conventional military does not seem to have access to the technologies used by Batman, Iron Man, etc., either explicitly or implicitly. I mean, there’s a reason the US government was pressing Tony Stark so hard in the beginning of Iron Man 2: the Pentagon wanted what Stark had, clearly implying that they did not, in fact, have it, i.e. Stark Industries wasn’t selling Iron Man technology to anyone. And they can’t be selling them to foreigners, because in addition to there being no indication of that in the stories it would be completely illegal without government authorization (see section II), and the federal government isn’t terribly likely to license the sale of weapons to foreign governments that it does not have itself.

Which raises the question: if the export of the really cool toys that our gadget-based superheroes like Batman and Ironman are using is restricted, how exactly is Stark Industries making any money? Wayne Enterprises is perhaps an easier case, as a company the size of Wal-Mart can probably misplace a billion dollars without too much difficulty, but a company that makes all of its money selling weapons has to sell weapons to someone. And if it isn’t to the government, the general public or to foreigners, where’s the budget come from?

The answer seems to be that these companies appear to be intended to replace existing defense companies, not exist in addition to them. It’s probably no mistake that the Stark Industries logo looks a lot like the Lockheed Martin logo. So Stark Industries presumably makes most of its money selling entirely mundane weapons to the government instead of, say, Lockheed Martin or Boeing. Wayne Enterprises makes a ton of money in its other business ventures, in addition to providing conventional arms to the government, so it is also probably intended to replace a number of other companies. This is a convenient and understandable substitution. Comic book authors probably don’t want to be bothered with the hassle of getting permission from actual companies to use their name and logos, and it’s doubtful that said companies would have given permission if asked. The replacement is made easier by the fact that most of the companies being replaced don’t have much in the way of public exposure.  For example, before it became linked to the Bush presidency, most people had probably never even heard of Halliburton, an $18 billion a year company.

Even then, defense contractors live and die on Defense Department funding, and wild conspiracy theories aside, it’d be pretty hard for one of them to secretly develop a weapons platform that the government didn’t directly fund and therefore know about. Black budgets may not be known to the public or to Congress, but someone at the Pentagon or CIA sure knows about them. But replacing an existing company with a fictional one permits us to attribute the profits of entirely mundane weaponry like jets, tanks, and firearms, all of which are significant profit centers for their respective manufacturers, to our fictional companies and their R&D departments.

II. The United States Munition List

But there actually are legal issues here. Specifically, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) 22 CFR parts 120-130, specifically the United States Munitions List, codified at 22 CFR part 121 (amendments). This is where the federal government lays out in great detail the restrictions placed on the export of weapons and related technologies. So, for example, it is illegal to export a gas turbine specifically designed for use in a ground vehicle. The regulation probably has in mind things like the M1 Abrams tank, but hey, isn’t the Batmobile (at least sometimes) powered by a gas turbine? And just about everything in one of Iron Man’s suits is going to find its way on the list somewhere, from the armor itself down to the micro-controllers in the servo motors: almost everything specifically designed for a military application, and even some things that aren’t, is on the export list. The ITAR even apply to civilian-developed software encryption, so they’d obviously apply to something as kick-ass as the arc reactor.

So what about S.H.I.E.L.D.? The general international law issues of S.H.I.E.L.D. will be the subject of a future post, but how does all this apply to what is sometimes portrayed as an organization under the control of the United Nations, clearly a “non-US person” under the terms of the USML? Again, if the Department of Defense doesn’t have access to S.H.I.E.L.D. gadgetry, it seems unlikely that State would authorize such a transaction. It gets better/worse. It is a violation under 22 CFR § 127.1(a)(1) to export any item on the USML without a license, and “export” is defined in 22 CFR § 120.17 as “Sending or taking a defense article out of the United States in any manner, except by mere travel outside of the United States by a person whose personal knowledge includes technical data.” So Iron Man’s little jaunt to Afghanistan in the first movie? That almost certainly constituted a violation of federal arms control laws. And even assuming that Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark invents their weaponry completely using their own funding and resources, the ITAR do not limit themselves to weapons developed with federal money: they apply to everything that fits into one of the categories on the USML.

Here we actually run into some difficulty trying to make the legal system in the real world sync up with the legal system in the comic book world. It is highly unlikely that the federal government would either 1) decide to scale back arms control laws when faced with gadget-based superheroes or 2) decide to give those superheroes a pass, especially if they wouldn’t share. So the question becomes: why doesn’t the US Attorney attempt to prosecute Tony Stark for this violation of federal law? More to the point, why is Congress messing around with hearings when they can simply send Stark to jail?

Well, probably because having Tony Stark do ten years (22 U.S.C. § 2778(c)) for arms control violations would be a pretty boring story.* And because fining Tony Stark the $1 million penalty there wouldn’t really make him think twice. Ultimately, this may just be one of those places where we have to pull out the mantra and remember that if we’re okay with a world where guys can shoot laser beams out of their eyes or turn into metal, we can probably handwave this too.

III. Conclusion

So really, we’re one for two. We can probably see how a company like Stark Industries or Wayne Enterprises could find the resources to develop weapons like the ones used by Batman and Iron Man, but actually using them, particularly in international contexts, seems to run up against a federal prerogative the government seems unlikely to abandon.

*Of course, this could be a great premise for Iron Man 3, where Stark is sent to prison, only to be released when the government realizes that it simply can’t get on without Robert Downey, Jr. Which is at least as plausible as some other things speculative fiction authors have tried to sell us.

40 Comments

Posted in administrative law, Batman, criminal law, international law, Iron Man, superheroes

Superheros and alter-egos

Posted on December 1, 2010 by | 38 comments

Bruce Wayne is Batman. Clark Kent is Superman. Tony Stark is Ironman. Peter Parker is Spiderman.

And so it goes. Throughout the various multiverses, numerous superheroes have maintained alter-egos, either to protect their “normal” lives and loved ones or to disguise their true natures. Sometimes both.

Either way, the idea of an alter-ego comes with certain legal complications, as has been recognized long before the publication of the first comic book. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, one of the main plot drivers is Jekyll’s pains to ensure that he maintains access to his property when he changes into Hyde. This largely took the form of instructing his servants to pay heed to Hyde and executing a will leaving everything to Hyde should Jekyll disappear.

Legally, there is no reason Jekyll could not do this. The fee simple gives a property owner the right to dispose of his property in any legal way that he sees fit. The problem is not that Jekyll’s design was illegal, but that it was unusual, to the point that people noticed something was up. Indeed, it was the very attempt to create and maintain this alter-ego which led to the discovery of his dual identity. If Jekyll/Hyde had been content to live two entirely different identities with no overlapping property or affairs, i.e. if Hyde had been willing to forego all of Jekyll’s advantages, the story could have ended quite differently.

So the problem is not only in the creation of an alter-ego, but doing so within the bounds of the law in ways that will maintain the integrity of the illusion. Both of these will cause problems on a number of levels.

I. Legal Status

The relationship between one’s “mundane” and “masked” identities is significant. If one starts life as a mundane person and then acquires a masked identity, e.g. Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, things are fairly straightforward, as one already has a full-fledged legal identity. But simply creating a new person out of whole cloth, as one would need to do if one were creating a new cover identity or faking one’s own death, is more difficult. Governments do this for people on a regular basis for things like witness protection programs, espionage, undercover operations, etc., but there are two main facts about this which present problems for our superheros. First, government-created identities are obviously created with government approval, so no laws are being broken. Second, these identities are rarely intended to be used either for significant transactional purposes or for very long, i.e. they are not intended to fully or permanently replace the original identity.

The basic problem then is that to create a new identity without government authorization requires the commission of a number of felonies, potentially including making false immigration statements (18 U.S.C. 1015), identification document fraud (18 U.S.C. 1028), perjury (18 U.S.C. 1621) and numerous related offenses under state law. And trying to live in contemporary society without such documents will be very, very difficult. One cannot buy a car, rent an apartment, get a checking account, or engage in a host of transactions essential to the logistics of mundane life without some form of government identification, identification which a superhero wanting to create a new mundane identity for his masked persona would need to forge. Creating successive false identities all but requires one to engage in illegal activities. So much for being a law abiding citizen.

All of these may seem trivial, but Al Capone was eventually brought down, not for racketeering or the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but for simple tax evasion. And if the illegality is not problem enough in its own right, these sorts of illegalities do tend to attract enough attention to make maintaining a secret identity pretty difficult, particularly if one wishes to maintain some kind of base-level commitment to law and order.

II. Money Laundering

Speaking of taxes, transferring large sums of money without a paper trail is difficult to do legally. Money laundering is a federal offense, and suggestions of financial shadiness tend to attract the attention of prosecutors. Jumping through offshore banks is no guarantee of secrecy: the discipline of forensic accounting exists almost solely to analyze patterns of financial transactions for irregularities. Even cash transactions are no solution, as transactions over $10,000 must be reported to regulators and paying for anything more than $500 with cash will be reported as suspicious. So while the money being “dirty” in some sense, i.e. representing the proceeds of or being used for some unlawful activity (18 U.S.C. 1956) for disguising the origin and ownership of funds to be a felony, simply the attempt to disguise it is likely to raise red flags all over the place, because most of the people engaged in that sort of activity are doing so for nefarious reasons. If our superhero or an artificial “mundane” persona is going to need to spend any money, this poses problems of the sort which could easily trigger an IRS audit. As the Joker observed at one point, “I’m crazy enough to take on Batman, but the IRS? No, thank you!” So again, it seems that our some of our heroes are faced with a difficult choice: maintain their secret identity or live within the bounds of the law, but even breaking the law in this way is no guarantee of success.

III. Evidence and the Sixth Amendment

Unfortunately, unless a hero plans to kill every villain with whom they come into conflict, bringing said villains to justice is actually made a lot more difficult the more a masked hero is involved in the case. It turns out that wearing a particular costume or uniform, which is how superheros and villains are normally identified in comic books, does not actually count as evidence that the person wearing them is, in fact, the same person all the time.

This is significant, because the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment reads “[I]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right. . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” The goal of the Confrontation Clause, as stated by the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), is to “preserve reliability of evidence” by establishing procedures so that “reliability [may] be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination.”

A witness whose identity cannot be definitively established would likely be useless as a witness. Courts and legislatures have made exceptions to the Confrontation Clause for situations like child witnesses against their abusers, but these are mostly limited to permitting the child, visible to the court, to testify via closed-circuit TV so that they do not have to see the accuser. There is no precedent to suggest that an essentially anonymous person or a person operating under a known or obvious alias would be permitted to testify in court without revealing their actual legal identity. A clever defense attorney could easily point out that we don’t even let witnesses in the witness protection program testify in open court while disguised; why should we let a superhero?

The Sixth Amendment aside, it is not clear that the Federal Rules of Evidence would permit a masked person to testify at all. Federal Rule of Evidence 602 reads, in part, as follows:”A witness may not testify to a matter unless evidence is introduced sufficient to support a finding that the witness has personal knowledge of the matter.” It will be much more difficult to prove that a masked person was a witness to a particular event when there may be no evidence that the masked person on the stand is the same masked person who allegedly saw what he claims to have seen. It is common practice for attorneys to ask a few simple questions such as name, address, age, etc. to establish a witness’ identity before proceeding to elicit testimony. Such questions would be impractical for a masked person to answer without revealing their identity, and a refusal to do that might well cause a judge to exclude their testimony entirely. Again, we don’t let traditional witnesses disguise themselves, and there isn’t any obvious legal reason that a superhero should be an exception to that rule. As the FRE apply to both criminal and civil cases, so this could be a problem even when the Sixth Amendment does not apply. Something like Peter Parker taking pictures of Spiderman’s exploits might help, but again, someone needs to be able to testify as to the veracity of those pictures, and that would mean testifying about their origin under oath.

This is a legal problem inherent to the maintenance of an alter-ego of any sort. Even a person who starts life as a mundane and then dons a mask to fight crime will run into this.

IV. Conclusion

So creating a superhero creating an alter-ego is a bit more legally complicated than it might seem. In addition to the problems of actually creating one in the first place, the logistics of maintaining the persona are significant, especially when trying to do so legally. But even the simplest alter-ego, the normal person who occasionally fights crime as a masked crusader, will run into legal problems if they are called to testify to what they have seen.

38 Comments

Posted in Batman, civil procedure, criminal law, criminal procedure, superheroes

Is Batman a State Actor?

Posted on November 30, 2010 by | 87 comments

Constitutional limitations on things like censorship, discrimination, and search and seizure do not apply to private individuals but rather to the federal government and, in some cases, to the states.  (The Thirteenth Amendment is a rare exception that applies to individuals).  As a result, evidence that a superhero obtains by breaking into a villain’s headquarters is admissible even though it was obtained illegally.  See, Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465 (1921).  And since it doesn’t invoke the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, any additional evidence obtained via the original evidence would also be admissible.

But what about superheroes like Batman who work in close cooperation with the police?  Could they fairly be described as state actors, thus triggering a whole spate of Constitutional protections?  I think the answer may be yes.

In Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. the Supreme Court gave a two-part test for whether the conduct of a private party could be fairly attributable to a state, thus implying state action:

First, the deprivation must be caused by the exercise of some right or privilege created by the State or by a rule of conduct imposed by the State or by a person for whom the State is responsible….Second, the party charged with the deprivation must be a person who may fairly be said to be a state actor. This may be because he is a state official, because he has acted together with or has obtained significant aid from state officials, or because his conduct is otherwise chargeable to the State. Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co., 457 U.S. 922, 937 (1982).

In Batman’s case, Commissioner Gordon is certainly a person for whom the State is responsible, and Batman often acts together with Gordon and obtains significant aid from Gordon in the form of information and evidence.  Batman’s conduct is also otherwise chargeable to the State because the Gotham Police Department has worked with Batman on numerous occasions (and thus knows his methods) and operates the Bat Signal, expressly invoking Batman’s assistance in a traditionally public function.  This suggests state action under the public function theory: “when private individuals or groups are endowed by the State with powers or functions governmental in nature, they become agencies or instrumentalities of the State and subject to its constitutional limitations.”  Evans v. Newton, 382 U.S. 296, 299 (1966).

In the real world, this would cause significant problems for Batman and Gotham.  Batman’s rough and tumble style would lead to a rash of Section 1983 claims for damages and probably also for an injunction against Batman’s future cooperation in police investigations.  As discussed earlier, most evidence that Batman collects would be inadmissible, and police use of that evidence might bar the use of additional evidence collected during a subsequent police investigation.

Now, clearly none of this is the case, so there are three possibilities.  Either all of the criminals in Gotham have incompetent attorneys, the state action doctrine in the DC universe is weaker than it is in the real world, or Gordon has actually managed to keep his reliance on Batman a secret.  I’m going to opt for the second explanation.  Superheroes like Batman are simply too effective for a court to shackle them with the Constitutional limitations of the state, especially with supervillains running around.  Perhaps the DC universe courts have developed a public emergency or necessity exception to the state action doctrine whereby private individuals pressed into public service in an emergency are not held to the same standards as ordinary state actors.

87 Comments

Posted in Batman, civil rights, criminal procedure, superheroes

Batman and Patents

Posted on November 16, 2010 by | 25 comments

[Be sure to read the update to this post in Law and the Multiverse Retcon #1!]

Batman’s use of gadgets developed by Wayne Enterprises poses an intellectual property strategy problem for the company.  Specifically, Batman’s public use of the inventions may actually prevent WE from obtaining patent protection.  Luckily, there’s a solution, albeit one that requires a little help from Bruce Wayne’s friends in the Department of Defense.

Batman is well known for his use of gadgets, many of which are based on advanced technology unavailable on the open market.  Some times these gadgets are explained as the product of Bruce Wayne’s own considerable intellect.  In other cases the gadgets have their origin with Wayne Enterprises R&D, perhaps with some modifications for Batman’s purposes.

Of course, Batman must always be ahead of the curve, so over time his gadgets have advanced to keep pace with technology.  The flip side is that over time gadgets and advanced technologies that were once exclusive to Batman fall into common use, perhaps sold by Wayne Enterprises.

And therein lies the problem, at least for gadgets that come out of Wayne Enterprises R&D.  Like many businesses, presumably Wayne Enterprises would seek to patent its inventions.  But Batman’s own use of the inventions in public may prevent Wayne Enterprises from obtaining a patent.  In the US, you generally cannot obtain a patent on something that was “in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States.”  35 USC 102(b).  This is known as the “on sale bar,” and it is a strict statutory bar to patentability.  So if Batman starts using a new Wayne Enterprises technology in a gadget more than a year prior to the patent filing, then he may have ruined the company’s chance at a patent.

Of course, Wayne Enterprises could always file for a patent before the one year grace period is up, but that would mean disclosing the technology to the public 18 months later when the patent application is published by the Patent and Trademark Office. 35 USC 122(b)(1)(A).  At most Batman would have 30 months in which to use the technology before supervillains could look it up online and start copying it (presumably supervillains are not concerned with patent infringement suits).

As Bruce Wayne, Batman could also keep the Wayne Enterprises technology to himself: using it in public–and thus destroying patentability–but also ordering Wayne Enterprises R&D to keep the technology on the shelf.  In the end Wayne Enterprises still loses, whether because competitors can copy the unpatentable technology or because the company is prevented from selling the technology.

So Batman’s use of Wayne Enterprise technology puts Bruce Wayne between a rock and a hard place: either harm the company that indirectly finances his heroics by using the technology in public or concede a round of the technological arms race by allowing the technology to be disclosed in a patent.

You might be thinking that all this talk of “public use” is a bit silly.  After all, Batman isn’t exactly walking around giving public demonstrations of his latest gadgets, much less explaining how they work.  The patent laws, however, take a broad view of what constitutes public use.  It was long ago established that it is enough that a single instance of the invention was used by a single person in public, even if the device itself and its method of operation were not visible (e.g., a hidden piece of armor beneath Batman’s costume).  Egbert v. Lippman, 104 U.S. 333, 336 (1881).  The purpose of the on sale bar is to induce inventors to disclose their inventions early; if the invention works well enough to use it in public, then it works well enough to be patented.

There is an exception to the public use bar for experimentation, but it is a narrow one, and it may not be practical in this case.  In general the exception requires that the experimentation be done by or at the direction of the inventor as part of the development and testing of the invention.  City of Elizabeth v. Pavement Co., 97 U.S. 126, 134 (1877).  Although Batman often uses gadgets that are not yet fully developed, it is doubtful that Wayne Enterprises would call Batman to the stand to testify that he was using a new gadget at the behest of a Wayne Enterprises scientist in order to test its performance under real world conditions.

Furthermore, the experimental use exception also requires that the testing necessarily be in public, such as in the case of a new pavement material.  Id.  But most if not all of Batman’s gadgets could be tested in a lab or other testing facility.  It’s hard to argue that it’s necessary to test them on actual supervillains and criminals

But now you might be saying: if Batman keeps his use of the gadget secret, and the criminals he catches don’t understand or even notice the new technology, how will this ever be a problem in practice?  Who’s going to snitch?  I think there are two major possibilities.  First, Batman doesn’t always have the luxury of operating in the shadows.  Sometimes he works in public, and cameras and bystanders may observe new technology in use.  But the second and more serious problem is that Bruce Wayne himself and possibly other Wayne Enterprises employees (e.g., Lucius Fox) know of Batman’s use of the technology.  Would Bruce Wayne really be willing to break the law in order for Wayne Enterprises to make more money?  Or would he choose for the company to forgo a patent in order to keep crime-fighting technology secret a while longer?  I think he would probably choose the latter.

There is hope, however.  Patent applications that include classified information are not published until either a set time period has expired or the secrecy order has been lifted. 35 USC 181; MPEP 120.  But neither do such applications mature into patents; effectively they are held in limbo while they remain classified.  So if Bruce Wayne could convince, say, the Department of Defense to classify a given technology, then Wayne Enterprises could apply for a patent early on, Batman could use the technology, and once the time was right the classification could be lifted, the patent could issue, and Wayne Enterprises could make a lot of money.  Given that Wayne Enterprises does a lot of work for the US military, this is a plausible solution to the problem.

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Posted in Batman, intellectual property, patents