One is a position in cricket, the other is the world’s best-known superhero.
But a company has been told that it cannot brand its products with the name Batsman as the public will become confused and liken it to Batman.
Intellectual Property Office adjudicator Oliver Morris refused to grant a trademark for the name to London-based Adelphoi, a sound and design company.
Adelphoi had sought to secure the Batsman trademark for exclusive exploitation across a huge range of goods, the majority of which were cricket-related.
But Mr Morris ruled in favour of DC Comics, the US entertainment giants behind the famous superhero who own the Batman trademark.
In his ruling, the judge accepted that ‘Batman is a very well known comic book character’ pointing to evidence that Batman was first invented in 1939.
Despite accepting that there is a ‘conceptual dissonance’ between Batman and Batsman, described as ‘a type of cricketer or an aircraft safety officer’, he found that the two words ‘may easily be mistaken for one another’.
Mr Morris added: ‘The marks look (and sound) so close that the difference in concept is likely to go unnoticed.
‘If the difference goes unnoticed then the conceptual difference has no material effect. There is a likelihood of confusion.
Mr Morris said that DC Comics relied on its European trademark in relation to comics, films, television programmes and ‘a wide variety of merchandise’.
He added that the evidence showed there was also a comic book character called ‘Batsman’, who, he said, is ‘apparently the disembodied consciousness of a future Batman’.
However, the judge found that this had no significance in his decision.
Batman has appeared in thousands of comic books, with global sales ranging from around $6 million (33.9million) to $12 million (£7.9million) per year between 2001 and 2007.
Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, grossed over £30million in the UK and its sequel, The Dark Knight sold more than 2.5million copies on Blu-ray and DVD by December 2008.
Mr Morris also detailed almost $20million (£13.1million) in merchandising sales in the UK between 1998 and 2011.
However, he declined to order Adelphoi to pay DC’s legal costs, finding that DC’s lawyers could have been ‘more measured in their approach’.
