Shelby Scores Key Win in Court Battle Over Mustang Eleanor Copyright
After a 10 year legal battle, a court ruled that the Mustang Eleanor name isn’t deserving of a character copyright.
For a whopping 10 years now, the folks at Shelby Trust – the entity that owns all of Shelby American‘s trademarks – has been embroiled in a legal battle with Denise Halicki, the surviving spouse of H.B. “Toby” Halicki, creator of the original Gone in 60 Seconds film, as well as The Junkman and Deadline Auto Theft over the latter’s Mustang Eleanor copyright claims. In each of those films, a Mustang code-named Eleanor made an appearance, and following the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, many enthusiasts and companies began trying to replicate the GT500 that became a huge big-screen star. Now, Shelby has finally won this knock-down, drag-out fight, much to the delight of the automotive community.
Halicki claimed that all of the vehicles referred to as Eleanor in the aforementioned movies comprised a single copyrightable character belonging to her, and that her purported character copyright prohibited the Shelby Trust from licensing other people and companies to manufacture, sell, or auction Shelby GT500 models and parts. Halicki sued and/or threatened to sue a number of GT500 manufacturers, customers, and auction houses, claiming their cars violated her alleged copyright interests because they looked like the Mustang Eleanor from the Gone in 60 Seconds reboot.
However, Halicki’s efforts have failed following a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Shelby’s lawsuit against her. The court found that the Eleanor code-named vehicles shown in these movies are not deserving of any character copyright protection. In its opinion, the court criticized Mrs. Halicki and her counsel for misleading prior courts through their “unfortunate practice of embellishing facts in their briefing” and causing “factual inaccuracies” to make their way into a Ninth Circuit opinion “that likely assumed the facts were true” when they were not. Based on its independent review of the movies in question, the Court found Halicki’s claims to be “plainly false” or “an embellishment, to say the least.”
This is obviously great news for Shelby, but it’s also fantastic news for all of the folks involved in lawsuits over the Eleanor name in recent years. Perhaps the most high-profile example of this comes from YouTuber Chris Steinbacher of the B Is For Build channel, who was working to transform a modern Mustang into an Eleanor clone, only to have Halicki’s legal team shut him down in a very public manner.
“We can finally tell all our important licensees and Shelby GT500 owners that Mrs. Halicki has absolutely no right to complain about or file a lawsuit based upon the looks of any car licensed by the Shelby Trust,” said Neil Cummings, Co-Trustee of the Shelby Trust. “That is exactly why we had to go to the extreme time and expense of pursuing our claims against Mrs. Halicki in court. The true value of all Shelby GT500s is now secure with this news.”
Photos: Eleanor Mustang
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