Star Wars battle returns to court

4th November 2009

AAP

THE George Lucas empire struck back on Tuesday against a British prop designer who sold replicas of the Stormtrooper uniforms from the Star Wars movies.

Designer Andrew Ainsworth has fought a long legal battle against Lucasfilm Ltd, which sued him over the replica suits and helmets he sold through a website.

Ainsworth sculpted the Stormtrooper helmets for the first Star Wars movie in 1977 and later sold replicas of the moulded white uniforms, worn in the films by warriors of the evil Galactic Empire.

The case ended ambiguously at London's High Court last year. A judge ruled that Ainsworth had violated Lucas's US copyright, but rejected a copyright claim against him under British law, saying the costumes were not works of art.

The judge also refused to enforce in Britain a $US20 million ($A22.1 million) judgment Lucasfilm won against Ainsworth in a California court in 2006, saying Ainsworth's US sales were not significant enough to make him susceptible to US jurisdiction.

Now lawyers for Lucas want the Court of Appeal to rule that the suits are sculptures and therefore works of art covered by British copyright law.

Michael Bloch, Lucasfilm's lawyer, said the case rested on "the scope and meaning of sculpture" as defined by the law.

Bloch said the judge at the previous hearing "erred in holding that it is an essential requirement of every sculpture that it have artistic character, in that it must have, as part of its purpose, a visual appeal in the sense that it might be enjoyed for that purpose alone."

"On the erroneous approach of the learned judge, arguably the most famous sculpture in the world, Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, would also be disqualified" - because its purpose is primarily religious.

The case is scheduled to last three days.

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Posted by han21 from USA (United States of America), None

07 November 2009 3:45 a.m. | Suggest removal » | Post reply »

according to research paper that he Star Wars canon consists of the six Star Wars feature films, along with all officially licensed, non-contradicting spin-off works to the six films. As once defined by Lucas Licensing:

We have what we call Canon, which is the screenplays, novelizations, and other works that are directly tied into continuity, and then there are a lot of marginal things, like the old Marvel Comics series, that we don't really try to work into the continuity when we're planning new projects. Even the LucasArts interactive games have a premise, a backstory with player characters that we're trying to tie into the overall continuity. It is sort of a godlike undertaking. We are creating this universe as we go along, but somebody has to keep his finger on everything that came before.

— Allan Kausch, from The Secrets of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire