Austin, Graeme W. --- "Entertaining foreign copyrights" [2017] ELECD 303; in Richardson, Megan; Ricketson, Sam (eds), "Research Handbook on Intellectual Property in Media and Entertainment" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 245

Book Title: Research Handbook on Intellectual Property in Media and Entertainment

Editor(s): Richardson, Megan; Ricketson, Sam

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784710781

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Entertaining foreign copyrights

Author(s): Austin, Graeme W.

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

There was something jarring about the pronouncement by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales that an infringement of an intellectual property right ‘is essentially a local matter involving local policies and local public interest’. The case was Lucasfilm Ltd v Ainsworth, a high-profile copyright dispute over various artefacts associated with the ‘Imperial Stormtrooper’ characters that appear in the massively successful Star Wars movie franchise. Like so many highly successful entertainment products, the Star Wars movies are hardly ‘local’ phenomena. The claimants were a number of Californian firms, referred to in the case as ‘Lucasfilm’. They alleged that the defendant had infringed the copyright in the Stormtrooper helmets, costumes and small figurines that depicted the Stormtroopers by marketing unlicensed replicas. For Lucasfilm, these Stormtrooper artefacts generated a significant income stream. The proposition that intellectual property rights often reflect local policies and local public interests is unassailable. But the most valuable embodiments of these rights are, like the Star Wars movies and their merchandising spin-offs, entertainment products that achieve global success on a massive scale. In the Court of Appeal, the valorization of the local character of intellectual property rights provided the foundation for a holding that a domestic court had no jurisdiction over infringements of copyright that occurred in another jurisdiction. That specific holding was overturned by the United Kingdom Supreme Court.