Star Wars Storm Troopers and Cross-Border Copyright Litigation: The Lucasfilm Case

The private international law of intellectual property is a relatively underdeveloped subject. It has attracted scholarly interest, especially in Europe, and the American Law Institute recently devoted a project to it, but only a handful of cases have been litigated through to judgment anywhere. This sparse context gives extra impact to Lucasfilm Inc. v. Ainsworth, the first United Kingdom case squarely to address some of the major conflicts problems relating to intellectual property. Of the two major issues it deals with, one has never come before a Canadian court and the other has been addressed by Canadian courts, but very differently from the way the English Court of Appeal dealt with it. The case is therefore interesting both for the questions of principle it raises and for the question of how far it represents the law in Canada. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]