Good news for movie director, writer and collector Guillermo del Toro. His acclaimed ‘not-Lovecraft but still fish people’ movie The Shape of Water had been hit, soon after its success, with a rather shaky-sounding plagiarism claim. This related to a 1969 U.S. Flipper-tastic TV movie in which a woman ‘bonded’ with a dolphin. Such things were hot, back then when dolphin language decoding seemed a real possibility.

Entertainment Weekly now reports that the legal challenge has finally dragged through the courts and come to a result — the U.S. Ninth Circuit federal court has definitively ruled there was no plagiarism.