December 2018. Airline company American Airlines (AA) has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Copyright Office. The air carrier does not accept that the Copyright Office has refused the copyright registration of the AA logo because it is not sufficiently original.

Photo Drewski2112 Visualhunt

Copyright registration

Unlike in the Netherlands, you can register copyright in the United States. Although copyright in principle automatically arises at the time of creation of a work, a copyright registration in the US offers a number of advantages when you want to enforce your right.

The bar is high

The US Copyright Office appears to have set the bar very high lately and rejects the registration of all kinds of logos because of a lack of originality. That also happened to the logos of UEFA and Vodafone. As for the AA logo, it will be interesting to see whether the court also adheres to the strict doctrine of the Copyright Office, or whether it applies a more lenient regime.

Rejected logos: not original