Atari Games Corp. v. Oman (original) (raw)
Atari Games Corp. v. Oman was a series of court cases where Atari, a video game developer, challenged the United States Copyright Office for refusing copyright registration for their arcade game Breakout. The Register of Copyrights first rejected Atari's registration in 1987, determining that Breakout lacked sufficient creativity to qualify as an audiovisual work. Atari twice appealed the register's decision before their copyright was granted. Decided in 1992, the case affirmed that video games are protected from clone developers who mimic a game's audiovisual aspects.
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| dbo:abstract | Atari Games Corp. v. Oman was a series of court cases where Atari, a video game developer, challenged the United States Copyright Office for refusing copyright registration for their arcade game Breakout. The Register of Copyrights first rejected Atari's registration in 1987, determining that Breakout lacked sufficient creativity to qualify as an audiovisual work. Atari twice appealed the register's decision before their copyright was granted. Decided in 1992, the case affirmed that video games are protected from clone developers who mimic a game's audiovisual aspects. Breakout was a single player ball-and-paddle game developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, based on a design specifications from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Atari sought registration for the game a decade later, after several courts had established that copyright applied to video games. However, Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman determined that the game did not have enough creative authorship to qualify as a copyrightable work, since the images were simple geometric shapes, and the audiovisual display was the dynamic creation of code rather than a fixed work created by an author. The decision was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg indicated that the Register needed to consider the work as a whole and not just its individual elements. The Register denied the registration again, citing the lack of creativity in the abstract geometric shapes. On a second appeal, Judge Ginsberg concluded that there was sufficient creativity in the graphical representations of a wall, a ball, and a paddle, as they looked and behaved in a way that was not standard or obvious. The court established an "extremely low" level of creativity required for copyright, and Atari was finally granted their registration for Breakout. The decision builds on early copyright cases that treat video games as an audiovisual work, including Atari v. Amusement World (1981), Atari v. North American Phillips (1982), Stern Electronics, Inc. v. Kaufman (1982), and Midway v. Artic (1983). The series of decisions became influential on the copyrightability of software more generally. Decades later, the United States Copyright Office has continued to cite Atari v Oman for the principle that an audiovisual work only requires a modicum of human creative authorship to be copyrightable. Several participants in the case later became notable figures in their own right: Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Inc., Bushnell founded Chuck E. Cheese, and Judge Ginsberg was appointed to the United States Supreme Court. (en) |
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| dbp:decisionBy | Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (en) |
| dbp:fullName | Atari Games Corporation v Ralph OMAN, Register of Copyrights (en) |
| dbp:name | Atari Games Corp. v. Oman (en) |
| dbp:numberOfJudges | 3 (xsd:integer) |
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| rdfs:comment | Atari Games Corp. v. Oman was a series of court cases where Atari, a video game developer, challenged the United States Copyright Office for refusing copyright registration for their arcade game Breakout. The Register of Copyrights first rejected Atari's registration in 1987, determining that Breakout lacked sufficient creativity to qualify as an audiovisual work. Atari twice appealed the register's decision before their copyright was granted. Decided in 1992, the case affirmed that video games are protected from clone developers who mimic a game's audiovisual aspects. (en) |
| rdfs:label | Atari Games Corp. v. Oman (en) |
| rdfs:seeAlso | dbr:Breakout_(video_game) |
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