A storm trooper's sleek white helmet has so many practical uses. It protects his head. It cultivates an intimidating look. It blocks UV rays when he's patrolling the hot desert streets of Tatooine.
These functions may be purely fictional, but a real-world court case in Britain has turned on this very question: Just how useful is that iconic helmet?
English prop-maker Andrew Ainsworth argues the helmets are very handy indeed – and not just for making him money. He has been selling replicas of the helmets to eager collectors based on the argument that they are utilitarian, and therefore not subject to the same copyright protections as artistic works, under English law.
On Wednesday, after years of appeals, the U.K. Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Ainsworth. It overturned a challenge by director George Lucas's company, Lucasfilm Ltd., and ruled that Mr. Ainsworth has the right to sell the Star Wars memorabilia in England.
Mr. Lucas conceived of the storm troopers, when he was writing the first Star Wars film, as characters in "fascist white-armoured suits." In the mid-1970s, artist Ralph McQuarrie drew his design for the suits. Prop makers Nick Pemberton and Mr. Ainsworth, who makes vacuum-moulded plastics, made the suits based on an artist's design. After making a series of prototypes, he produced 50 helmets out of the final approved design, which were used in the movie. He was paid £20 for each helmet and £385 for each accompanying suit of armour.
Mr. Ainsworth also kept the moulds he used to make them. His company, Shepperton Design Studios Ltd., now sells the exact replicas online at £199 for a helmet and £599 for the armour (or slightly more than $300 for a helmet and close to $1,000 for the armour).
Mr. Lucas has spent years in court trying to stop Mr. Ainsworth, but had no luck in previous cases in England in 2008 and 2009. The key question before the Supreme Court was whether the helmets are utilitarian, which affords them only 15 years of copyright protection in Britain; or whether they are artistic works, which would keep them under copyright for 70 years after Mr. Lucas's death.
"The whole question is, what's meant by sculpture, which is actually a jolly interesting question," Mr. Ainsworth's lawyer, Alastair Wilson, said in an interview Wednesday. "It's not enough to look at how something's made. You've got to look at what it is and what it's for."
Lucasfilm argued that the helmets deserved the protection given to artistic works, given that the helmets had no practical purpose.
"The storm troopers' helmets and armour did not exist in order to keep their wearers warm or decent or to protect them from injury in an inter-planetary war," said the company's written submission to the appeal court. "Their sole purpose was to make a visual impression on the film-goer. They are therefore artistic works."
Lucasfilm did not win on the artistic argument. The panel of five judges said "it was the Star Wars film that was the work of art that Mr. Lucas and his companies created. The helmet was utilitarian in the sense that it was an element in the process of production of the film."
However, the court also decided that U.S. copyright law could be enforced in the U.K. in terms of Mr. Ainsworth's sales in the United States. Lucasfilm won a 2006 lawsuit against him in California, which ruled he violated the copyright in the United States by selling between $8,000 and $30,000 (U.S.) in memorabilia there. Lucasfilm may now proceed against him for damages based on those U.S. sales, the court ruled.
"There is no doubt that the modern trend is in favour of the enforcement of foreign intellectual property rights," the court's decision said.
"The judgment is an important step in modernizing U.K. law," Lucasfilm Ltd. said in a statement Wednesday. "Lucasfilm remains committed to aggressively protecting its intellectual property rights relating to Star Wars in the U.K. and around the globe through any and all means available to it."