walkingdork wrote: How can anyone take these kinds of cases serious anymore? Is a Stormtooper helmet a sculpture? Who cares.

Lucas understands the near future of computing and tech things. All those figures which created his empire is under the threat of becoming obsolete if rules are not set up so that copyrighted/patented/whatever system they can think of is not in place when 3D printers become commonplace. Just like music to napster and video to p2p, 3D models are the next thing to get consumed.

This "sculpture" debate is just the on the books legal wranglings they have to navigate.

Yes that Limewire thing is ridiculous, it's amazing that all the entertainment industries can easily ignore that it was their infighting which partly caused the drop in the other. People stopped listening to music because every tv and movie suddenly became cheap enough to consume in mass quantities. and even that argument is not right, as more people have heard more music in the last 15 years then probably ever before. The problem is money is not being moved around, and that's making everyone nervous. and when they get nervous they'll let things slide or get out of hand. The world needs an easy (and not heavily taxed) system to move pennies. Trillions of penny transactions.