Fifteen other states and the District of Columbia have since passed similar laws, although cannabis continues to be classified as an illegal narcotic under U.S. law. (Reuters) To win their appeal, Lucas` legal team claimed that the Stormtrooper armor had no practical function and was a sculpture because its purpose was purely artistic. They argued that “the question of functionality does not arise because the elements in question have no functional purpose. Stormtrooper helmets and armor did not exist to keep their wearers warm or decent, or to protect them from injury in an interplanetary war. Their only purpose was to leave a visual impression on the cinephile. They are therefore artistic works. These and other related allegations were rejected by the UKSC, which upheld the decisions of the High Court and Court of Appeal, taking the gist of the trial judge`s decision, quoting: “It was a mixture of costume and prop. But its primary function is utilitarian.
While it was intended to express something, it was for utilitarian purposes. Although it has an interest as an object and although it was intended to express an idea, it was not conceived or created with the intention of doing so other than as part of the representation of the character in the film. In my opinion, this does not give him the necessary quality of artistic creation. 1997 – Pub. L. 105–147 adds a definition of “financial gain”. As the highest and therefore most influential British court, the UKSC first had to take into account the relevant previous judgments of the courts of England and the Commonwealth on the legal meaning of the term “sculpture”. A central question that emerged from this review was “the relative importance of the functional and the artistic” – in other words, whether or not a work was conceived by the artist as a commodity (as U.S. Customs asserted in the Brancusi case). Reference was made to a famous 1985 decision of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, which stated that Frisbees were not sculptures, where the court stated: “It seems inappropriate to us to consider products such as plastic flying discs manufactured as injection moulding toys as sculptures within the meaning of copyright law.” Section 1011(d) of the General Intellectual Property and Communications Reform Act 1999, referred to in the definition of “commissioned work”, is section 1000(a)(9) [Title I, § 1011(d)] of the Pub. L. 106–113, which amended paragraph 2 of this definition.
See the 1999 Amendment Note below. This most recent case before the UKSC concerned the 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. The first trial took place in 2009 at the High Court of Justice in London, where George Lucas and his Star Wars merchandising companies sued an English manufacturer of film props, Andrew Ainsworth. It was a reproduction of replicas of the white Stormtroopers uniforms used in the first Star Wars movie. Ainsworth had been commissioned by Lucas in the 1970s to make the vacuum-molded plastic armor, but had recently used his original molds to make versions and sell them to the public. Lucas claimed to have violated his copyright on the original drawings of the armor, but to succeed, he had to convince the court that his drawings were for sculpture. Lucas lost his case and appealed to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, which upheld the High Court`s 2008 decision in 2009 (Artlaw AM 323 & 343). Lucas then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and that court`s reasoning in support of its decision on the legal meaning of “sculpture” is both instructive and instructive. In Miller v.
California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 pp. C. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973), the Supreme Court held that a work is obscene and may be regulated if it appeals to the pruritic interest of a spectator; depicts sexual behaviour in a blatantly offensive manner; and has no serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The court further ruled that interpretations of this definition can vary across the United States and that communities can apply their own local standards to determine obscenity.