Poverty stricken film director George Lucas has lost the final round of his copyright battle with a man selling costumes based on characters from Lucas’ Flash Gordon rip-off Star Wars.

Andrew Ainsworth was the prop designer who came up with the Stormtrooper armour, and in recent years has been selling replica costumes, made from the original moulds, for £1500 – ironically rather more than the ‘official’ costume retails for. Lucas, noting that these unauthorised sales were biting into his meagre profits from the Star Wars films, sued for $20 million in 2004, and the fight has dragged through the High Court, The Court of Appeal and now the Supreme Court, with Lucas losing every time, because he couldn’t convince judges that the costumes were works of art, rather than the mere props that they clearly are. In each case, the judges ruled that the costumes were out of copyright, and while Lucas won a case in the USA, that ruling can’t be enforced in Britain.

Lucas was backed in his arguments by fellow penniless directors Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, who feared that defeat would set a precedent, allowing underpaid props men the world over to supplement their pensions by selling handfuls of replicas to people with more money than sense.

With the case finally over, Lucas can now return to making the highly original, quality films that he’s renowned for.