ABSTRACT
In July 2011, international media widely reported that film director George Lucas had lost a Star Wars copyright case in the UK Supreme Court. Lucasfilm, a company committed to aggressively protecting its intellectual property rights relating to the Star Wars franchise, had sued a hitherto unknown British prop designer named Andrew Ainsworth over replica storm trooper outfits. Ainsworth, who built the original storm trooper helmets while working out of his small design studio in Twickenham, South London on 1977’s Star Wars, had been selling the costumes based on his original molds online for years. Lucas had repeatedly claimed the designer was breaching his copyright and in 2006, he won a $20 million judgment in the United States, resulting in a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California that barred Ainsworth from importing his Star Wars products. In 2008, Lucasfilm took the case to Britain’s High Court and in 2009 to the Court of Appeal, before finally bringing it to the Supreme Court in 2011. Meanwhile, Ainsworth continued selling small batches of storm trooper helmets, armor, and replicas of weapons, the Dark Lord costume, or the original R2D2 droid (complete with lights and wheels) for prices ranging between 300 and 2,500 British pounds per item. The courts unanimously concluded that props such as the storm trooper helmets were not art and thus not subject to British copyright laws, rejecting Lucasfilm’s claim to enforce the earlier U.S. copyright judgment in the United Kingdom.2
