George Barris' creation, the Batmobile, can no longer be recreated without permission from DC Comics.

Batman didn’t need Robin, Alfred or even his famed bat-a-rang, just a good legal team in order to protect the Batmobile from thieves … copyright thieves.

The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the masked crime fighter’s ride qualified for copyright protection, foiling the efforts of Mark Towle, owner of Gotham Garage, to continue making replicas of the caped crusader’s vehicles from the 1960s television series as well as the 1989 movie. Towle makes replicas of other famous cars as well.

Towle and his legal team, who had already lost an earlier court ruling in 2011, contended the cars didn’t meet the standards for the protection, suggesting that since the cars Gotham Garage builds don’t actually have the working equipment that made the “real” cars so identifiable, they “lacked the essence of the Batmobile character.”

To determine whether characters in comic books, television shows or movies are entitled to such protection, courts conduct a three-part test. First, the character must have “physical as well as conceptual qualities.” It also has to be “sufficiently delineated” so people recognize it as the same character across time. And third, the character has to be “especially distinctive.”

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Towle’s team claimed that since the Batmobile has taken on many forms during the last 30-plus year history of the vehicle. The case is a big deal as he sells the replicas of the 1966 Batmobile for $90,000 each.

“We didn’t copy the design of the car in the comic book, and we didn’t copy any of the character attributes. It’s just a car,” said Larry Zerner, Towle’s attorney. “These automobiles don’t fight crime.”

However, the three-judge panel didn’t buy the argument, with Judge Sandra Ikuta making note of that in the decision. The ruling was unanimous.

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“As a copyrightable character, the Batmobile need not have a consistent appearance in every context, so long as the character has distinctive character traits and attributes,” she wrote, adding, “As Batman so sagely told Robin, ‘In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential.’

“Here, we conclude that the Batmobile character is the property of DC, and Towle infringed upon DC’s property rights when he produced unauthorized derivative works of the Batmobile as it appeared in the 1966 television show and the 1989 motion picture.”

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Warner Bros., which owns DC Comics, declined to comment on the outcome of the case. Neither Towle nor his attorney said they would appeal the ruling.