A man accused of hoarding more than 4,000 unclassified porn films has had all charges against him dropped after a government blunder.

David Jessett, was due to go on trial at Lewes Crown Court, but a legal loophole meant the case collapsed.

The ruling has left Brighton and Hove City Council with a legal bill for thousands of pounds plus days of wasted man hours spent investigating the case.

The 42-year-old had denied six offences of possessing unclassified films after a police raid on his home in Belvedere Terrace, Brighton.

Officers allegedly seized DVDs and equipment that was capable of making 15 copies of films at a time during the raid on July last year.

Mr Jessett was due to stand trial in January but while on bail he was charged in May this year with possessing a further 100 DVDs.

He had not entered a plea to the second set of charges.

Mr Jessett was being prosecuted under the 1984 Video Recording Act, which ordered videos and video games to be classified and age-rated by the British Board of Film Classification.

But due to an administrative mistake when the act was introduced 25 years ago, the European Commission was not notified about the law.

The law cannot now be enforced in British courts until new legislation is passed by parliament in three months time.

Thousands of people have already been successfully prosecuted under the act but the Department of Culture, Media and Sport has said the convictions will not be overturned.

Since 2001 Brighton & Hove City Council has prosecuted ten people for offences under the act.

Sentences have varied from unpaid work to fines and in three cases the offenders were sentenced to prison terms of up to 2 months.

Because no future prosecutions can be proceeded with until the act is enforced the council was forced to apply for all of the charges against Mr Jessett to be quashed.

Yesterday (thur) Christine Henderson, prosecuting for the council, told the court the local authority had only found out about the mistake just over a week ago.

She said: "This act has never been properly en-acted. It means Mr Jessett cannot stand trial on the indictments."

She said that when the government had rectified the loop-hole the the council may consider a new prosecution against Mr Jessett.

Mr Jessett, whose defence costs will be met by the tax payer, declined to comment after the hearing. He said: "No comment at the moment. I am still trying to understand it myself."

The blunder was discovered during work on the government's Digital Britain project, which aims to boost broadband and new media in the UK.