Jerry Seinfeld attends the "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" photo call at The Paley Center on July 17, 2019. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

A Second Circuit panel has upheld the dismissal of a copyright lawsuit from a former collaborator of Jerry Seinfeld, who claimed to have come up with the idea for the hit series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in a summary order Thursday that Christian Charles, a writer and director who worked with Seinfeld on the show's pilot, had waited too long to file his suit under the three-year statute of limitations for copyright infringement claims.

The ruling upheld an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan of the Southern District of New York, who tossed the 2018 lawsuit last October on substantially the same grounds.

Seinfeld's lawyer, who in the past has bashed Charles' suit as a self-serving "money grab," said in a statement Thursday that the Second Circuit's ruling was further proof that his client was the "sole creator" of the show.

"At every level, the courts have seen through this ridiculous attempt to capitalize on the success of the show," said Orin Snyder, a partner in the New York office in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. "Today's ruling by the appellate court is another vindication against these opportunistic and phony claims."

Peter Skolnik, of Clark Guldin, the New Jersey and New York-based lawyer who represented Charles, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Second Circuit panel held that Charles' claims hinged on whether his contributions to the show's pilot had qualified him as the owner of the "Comedians in Cars" copyrights. But the ruling credited Nathan's findings that Seinfeld had twice rejected Charles' requests for back-end compensation before "Comedians in Cars" premiered in 2012, making it clear that Seinfeld considered Charles' only involvement to be on a work-for-hire basis.

When the "Comedians in Cars" pilot aired in July 2012 without crediting Charles, it was also apparent that Charles' claim to ownership had been "publicly repudiated," officially putting him on notice of his claims, the Second Circuit said.

"Either one of these developments was enough to place Charles on notice that his ownership claim was disputed and therefore this action, filed six years later, was brought too late," the panel wrote in a three-page order.

"Charles's infringement claim is therefore time-barred because his ownership claim is time-barred," the decision said.

According to court documents, Charles worked up a treatment and shot a pilot with Seinfeld when the comedian began developing the show as a web series in 2012. The two later had a falling out over Charles' demands for compensation and ownership, and while he was ultimately paid nearly $108,00 for his work, Charles had no further involvement with "Comedians in Cars."

Charles said in court filings that between 2012 and 2014 that he "maintained a reasonable and good faith belief" that Seinfeld would eventually acknowledge his ownership and "bring him in" on the show, which originally debuted on the streaming service Crackle.

In wasn't until Netflix inked a lucrative deal to bring the show onto its platform in 2017 that Seinfeld's lawyer told Charles directly that his client was the sole creator and owner of the show, he said.

Nathan's ruling last year, however, rejected those arguments and dismissed the case under the statute of limitations, finding that a "reasonably diligent plaintiff would have understood that Seinfeld was repudiating any claim of ownership that Charles may have."

"We conclude that the district court was correct in granting defendants' motion to dismiss, for substantially the same reasons that it set out in its well-reasoned opinion," the Second Circuit said Thursday.

The panel included Second Circuit Judges John M. Walker Jr., Rosemary S. Pooler and Gerard E. Lynch.

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