"You can't imagine how nervous I am about handling these things," Chihuly lawyer O. Yale Lewis said about the pieces, which were spread across his table, the courtroom floor and a bench. "I'm not touching them."

Chihuly Inc. and Portland Press Inc., which is Chihuly's publishing company, filed a lawsuit last October against former Chihuly glass-blower Bryan Rubino, glass artist and broker Robert Kaindl, and four galleries that sold Rubino's work, which Lewis described as Chihuly copies.

The complaint, which seeks $1 million in damages, raises questions about when a piece of art is merely influenced by another piece, and when it's an illegal copy of that work.

Chihuly, recognizable by his eyepatch, is an immensely popular artist in the Northwest, though a near-fatal car accident and a shoulder separation in the late 1970s left him unable to blow his own glass. Instead, he designs pieces and has them rendered by a team of glass-blowers.

Chihuly, who is based in Seattle, is widely credited with having legitimized glass-blowing as a fine art over the last four decades. He created the ceiling of the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, and his pieces appear in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and about 225 other museums around the world, according to his Web site.

His work has been so influential that it's not uncommon to see pieces similar to his style in shops and galleries throughout the Northwest, but his lawyers say this is the first copyright-infringement lawsuit he's filed.

Lawyer Bradford J. Axel, who represents Kaindl and Rubino, asked Judge James Donohue to toss the lawsuit because Chihuly's lawsuit didn't do the basic task of indentifying specific pieces that infringed on Chihuly's work, only some of which is actually copyrighted. Kaindl, of Redmond, and Rubino, of Shelton, deny deliberately copying Chihuly.

"We sent (Chihuly's lawyers) a letter immediately after the complaint was filed, saying, 'What's infringing what here?"' Axel told the judge. "No response."

The judge said he was senstive to those concerns, but that he would allow the lawsuit to proceed, with trial expected late this year. He ordered the two sides to work together to specify which pieces are at issue, so the court can compare them side-by-side.

Axel and his co-counsel, Kathleen Petrich, contend that Chihuly is trying to claim copyrights over the techniques of making glass art and over a style of glass art - which cannot be legally claimed any more than someone could copyright the Impressionist style of painting.

Chihuly's lawyers argue that Kaindl recruited Rubino to make copies of Chihuly pieces, which were then offered to local galleries. The pieces bore Kaindl's name or the fictional name Lestat, not Chihuly's.

Kaindl continues to operate Web sites where he sells glass art, though the galleries named in the lawsuit - Lakeshore Gallery in Kirkland, Kenneth Behm Galleries in Bellevue, and Trammell-Gagne and Unik! in Seattle - have stopped selling the disputed works.

Lewis said the Chihuly pieces were brought into court to demonstrate some of the copied work. Following the hearing, workers from Chihuly Inc. carefully wrapped the pieces in bubblewrap, placed them in large cardboard boxes and took them away.