Atari Games Corp. v. Oman

In 1974, Steve Jobs was hired by Atari, a developer of arcade games. Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell requested a single player arcade game based on Pong (1972), where the player uses a paddle to hit a ball towards bricks. Jobs recruited friend Steve Wozniak to assist with the project, developing the concept into Breakout (1976), after four days and four nights of hardware engineering. In the game, the player uses a rectangular paddle to hit a square bouncing ball against a wall of red, amber, green, and blue bricks. Wozniak worked to minimize the number of microchips while still meeting the design specifications from Atari. On May 13, 1976, Breakout was launched in arcades. The game became a commercial success, becoming one of the top five highest-earning arcade games in America for 1976, 1977, and 1978. Breakout had a total arcade production run of 11,000 cabinets manufactured by Atari, estimated to have generated over ( adjusted for inflation) in sales revenue. This success led to sequels such as Super Breakout and Breakout 2000, as well as adaptations to other game devices. == Legal process ==

Copyright registration By the early 1980s, courts had decided that video games may qualify for copyright registration as audiovisual works, in cases such as Stern v. Kaufman (1982), Midway v. Artic (1983), and Midway v. Dirkschneider (1983). On February 5, 1987, Atari filed for an expedited copyright registration for Breakout, in anticipation of litigation to protect their work. The copyright examiners explained that copyright does not protect common geometric shapes, nor the simple audio tones in the game. Moreover, the arrangements of those shapes "are also not registrable since they are created randomly by the player and not by the author of the video game". In May 1988, the district court found that the Register's decision was not an abuse of discretion, and that the Copyright Office had reasonably applied the law. Judge Ginsberg concluded that the Copyright Office had not explained what standard of originality was needed for copyright registration. Their letter explained that if they were to grant copyright in a painting of flat geometric shapes, the copyright would be based on the brush strokes, depth, and perspective, and not the shapes themselves. Counsel for the Register argued that the use of non-representational, abstract images showed a lack of creativity. However, the appeal court responded that there was nothing obvious or commonplace about the abstract representation chosen for the game design. In oral arguments, the court responded that the game has "a ball that doesn't operate in any standard way, a wall that doesn't look like a wall. Those are fanciful elements. Are they not?". The court further noted that the colors of the bricks were not typical of a standard wall. In finding that the minimal threshold of creativity had been met, the court mentioned the synchronization of graphics and sound, the ball's changing speed and fanciful physics, and the design and placement of the scoreboard. The appeal court ruled that the Register was unreasonable in rejecting the copyright application, measured against the "extremely low" level of creativity suggested by the Supreme Court in Feist. ==Impact==

Atari received a copyright registration, which could be used to prevent competition from alleged Breakout clones. When Breakout-style games for the iPhone began to appear on the App Store in 2008, Atari sent takedown notices to have them removed. In 2017, Atari sued Nestle for using the likeness of Breakout in an ad, replacing the images of bricks with small Kit Kat bars. Building on video game case law such as Atari v. Amusement World (1981), Atari v. North American Phillips (1982), and Midway v. Artic (1983), the decision in Atari v. Oman established that copyright law applies to the audiovisual outputs of video games. Granting copyright to the audiovisual display is important to protect games not just from clone developers who copy the game's code verbatim, but also those who write distinct code to mimic the audiovisual aspects. The copyrightable creativity described in Atari v. Oman can be found in the selection and arrangement of graphic elements on the screen, as well as the sequence of these screens. The case is also influential for shaping the legal understanding of originality required for copyright. In several software cases that followed Atari v Oman, courts interpreted the originality requirement with the same minimalist standard. Tracy Lea Meade in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law notes that the Supreme Court did not set out a test for copyright originality in Feist, leaving other courts to develop this logic. As one of the first copyright cases after Feist, Atari v. Oman is remembered for creating a test for originality from words such as "obvious" or "mechanical", granting copyright to Breakout for surpassing a "negative" definition of what it is not. Katherine McDaniel in the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property states that Atari v. Oman established that an arrangement of simple geometric shapes may be eligible for copyright protection if it involves a modicum of creativity. But the second Atari v. Oman appeal was a break from the past, according to Kevin Hooper in IDEA: Journal of Law and Technology, increasing the chances that a copyright claimant would succeed in registration. Decades later, the U.S. Copyright Office cites Atari v. Oman for the principle that an audiovisual work needs only sufficient amount of original and creative human authorship to be copyrightable. Ginsberg's pattern of support for authors and copyright owners is highlighted by The Nevada Law Journal, remembering both these decisions as Atari v Oman I and II. ==References==