We railed against CNN.com earlier but this piece is worth reading and was buried deep in the Entertainment section, not a top headline.
Holy court action! Can 'Dark Knight' beat Turkish mayor?
Thu November 13, 2008
(CNN) -- He's kerpowed the Joker and put the Penguin on ice,
but Batman faces a new adversary -- the mayor of an oil-producing
Turkish town.
Huseyin Kalkan, leader of the city of Batman in southeastern Turkey,
plans to sue Christopher Nolan, director of the latest Batman movie
"The Dark Knight," for taking its name without consultation," according
to media reports.
"The royalty of the name 'Batman' belongs to
us... There is only one Batman in the world, " Hurriyet Daily News.com
reported Kalkan as telling the Dogan news agency. "The American
producers used the name of our city without informing us."
Kalkan, who represents the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, added
that he decided to take action after someone suggested that the
cash-strapped community needed more funds.
"We found this
criticism right and started to look for legal possibilities of a case
like that," Hurriyet Daily News.com reported.
Batman, which has
a population of just under 250,000, is the provincial capital of the
oil-rich Batman Province and lies close to the Batman River.
In
recent years it has been hit by a series of female suicides and
features in the novel "Snow" by Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.
"The Dark Knight" movie is based on the Batman comic-book character created in 1939 by Bob Kane.
Released by Warner Bros -- a sister company to Turner Broadcasting
System, which owns CNN -- during the summer, "The Dark Knight" has now
taken just under $1 billion worldwide, according to box-office Web site
boxofficemojo.com, including $528.7 million from domestic ticket sales
and $469 million from international receipts.
The film is also
scheduled for re-release in January as part of an awards season push,
with focus especially on supporting actor Heath Ledger, who played Joker and who died earlier this year.
Local newspaper Batman Cagdas has reported that several former
residents of Batman living in Germany have had problems registering
their business -- but Kalkan says he has no knowledge of the claims.
Lawyer Vehbi Kahveci, head of the Intellectual and Industrial Property
Rights Commission of the Istanbul Bar, told Hurriyet Daily News.com
that the "Batman" name was registered worldwide.
He added that the town had missed the timeframe during which it could complain about any infringement of its name.
Warner Bros said that it was only aware of the action through the media and had yet to be presented with any legal papers.