Lord Pailface
Copyright is a deadly serious business, as the AI company Anthropic found out when it was sued for copyright infringement and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to implicated authors, or as the online platform Afterlife discovered when it was ordered by a Canadian court to pay $20 million to plaintiffs for publishing unauthorized obituaries[i], but just like anything else there are times when copyright veers from the sublime to the ridiculous. One of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon was the so-called “Monkey Selfie” case, that I wrote about here. The recent byelection in Britain in which Reform UK leader Nigel Farage stood for re-election in his riding of Clacton, having resigned to protest a Parliamentary investigation into his acceptance of undeclared financial gifts, has highlighted another. Because all major political parties in Britain boycotted the election, calling Farage’s resignation and subsequent re-election bid a political stunt, the runner up was Count Binface, actually British comedian Jon Harvey. Remarkably Binface, representing the registered Count Binface Party, took almost 27% of the votes, over 9,000, although Farage won handily.
Harvey became Binface, a costume where he wears a garbage can (aka rubbish bin) on his head, following his original persona as Lord Buckethead, the costume he wore when he challenged then British Prime Minister Theresa May in the 2017 general election. May won with 31,000 votes. Buckethead got 249. But he did get his photo taken with May and the other candidates, a photo that went viral. Because of the notoriety, the God of Copyright Infringement came knocking. Lord Buckethead was a character created by Director and writer Todd Durham for his 1984 parody of Star Wars, a film known as Gremloids (in the UK) or Hyperspace (in the US). The film was obscure to say the least, earning most of its revenue through VHS sales. Buckethead enjoyed a brief period of fame in the 1980s when some individuals dressed up in the character to oppose Margaret Thatcher and John Major, but it was Harvey’s encounter with May that shot the character to fame some 30 years later. That’s when Harvey’s problems began. According to the Guardian, Durham began to show a proprietorial interest in the almost-forgotten character he had created decades earlier. He appears to have wanted to license the character if people wanted to use Buckethead for political purposes. Harvey had no appetite for a legal fight, and so Buckethead has morphed into Binface.
From a copyright perspective, the case raises a couple of interesting issues. In British law, there is a fair dealing exception for cases of parody, caricature and pastiche. In the US, while parody is not codified in US law, it is an accepted fair use defence provided other factors in the four step fair use evaluation do not rule it out. In particular, the use must not negatively impact the commercial prospects of the original work in the marketplace. Clearly Gremloids/Hyperspace had no impact on the commercial viability of Star Wars. George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars franchise and its characters, did not bother to sue Graham although he is notoriously litigious with respect to his IP rights. One of the most famous examples is the copyright infringement case he brought in Britain against prop designer Andrew Ainsworth, who designed the original Darth Vader helmet and sold fifty of them to Lucas in 1976. Years later, after Star Wars had become globally famous, Ainsworth dug out his old moulds and started selling helmet replicas from his studio in Shepperton. Lucas sued for copyright infringement in the US, and won, but Ainsworth had no assets in America, so Lucas sued again in the UK. The case lasted seven years but in 2011, Ainsworth prevailed. The UK Supreme Court upheld an appeal court ruling that the helmets were not sculptures protected by copyright, but utilitarian industrial designs, like a toaster. The protection period for industrial designs in Britain is only 15 years, and by the time Ainsworth had started reproducing the helmets in the early 2000s, protection had expired. Had they been categorized as sculptures, they would have been protected for Lucas’s lifetime plus a period of 70 years. The UK court agreed, however, that Ainsworth’s helmets constituted copyright infringement in the US and enjoined him from not selling them into the US market.
This case was also made famous by the tactics of the barristers for the opposing sides. Lucas’ lawyer displayed the helmet as work or art, bringing the helmet into court in a crystal case set on a pedestal, as befitting a sculpture. Ainsworth’s lawyers brought in several helmets in a cardboard box and invited the justices to try them on for size, thus stressing their utilitarian rather than artistic nature. Courtroom theatrics count.
Coming back to Lord Buckethead, could Jon Harvey have claimed a parody defence? Not really. In adopting the character of Lord Buckethead, he was not parodying the original film, as Gremloids had done with regard to Star Wars. He was simply using what was arguably a copyright-protected character in another way. If you use Mickey to promote your candidacy for the Rathaus, don’t think that the Walt Disney Company won’t assert its trademark and copyright to prevent misuse of the mouse with the squeaky voice. This is why I have been very careful not to use the character of Count Binface to attract your attention to this blog post. While it is unlikely that Harvey would pursue legal action if I used an image of Binface without authorization, as a proponent of the value of copyright, I should walk the talk and not infringe. I could seek permission, but creating my own character is a faster solution. Lord Pailface is a good substitute. Does the modicum of skill and judgment I used to create it mean it is copyright protected? I hope we will never have to find out.
© Hugh Stephens, 2026.
[i] Afterlife went out of business and never paid. It was however “reincarnated” as Echovita, which scrapes obits from the website of funeral homes and other public sites and rewrites them using only the basic elements of the deceased’s life, facts which are not protected by copyright, thus avoiding being charged with copyright infringement.
