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31 May 2019Copyright

US Copyright Office approves two NBA logos, but denies another

The Review Board of the US Copyright Office yesterday, May 30, approved the registration of two logo designs for basketball teams the Detroit Pistons and the Lakeland Magic, after an appeal from the National Basketball Association (NBA).

In only a partial win for the NBA, however, the board denied registration of a logo for another team, the San Antonio Spurs.

The Copyright Office initially denied registration of all three designs in October 2017 on the grounds that they lacked originality.

With respect to the Spurs logo, the office had previously found that “arranging the initials of a professional basketball team within a basketball is an obvious, almost inevitable configuration that does not demonstrate sufficient creativity”.

The office had also concluded that the Pistons and Magic logos contained “common and familiar shapes” which did not meet the originality threshold.

However, after reconsidering the designs, the review board found that these logos were registerable.

With respect to the Pistons design, the board found that the “combination of the letter ‘D’ and various geometric shapes featuring numerous colors and shading exhibits sufficient creativity”.

The Magic logo, the review board noted, contained four colours and shading on the basketball which added three-dimensionality to the work. The logo also contains a basketball surrounded by a black and white double border, incorporating numerous star designs. This arrangement, the board said, was not “common or intuitive”.

Despite approving the Magic logo for registration, the board noted that its design was “still relatively simple”, and that the “resulting protection is thin”.

The board upheld the office’s refusal of registration for the Spurs logo, finding that the design was based mostly on the shape of a basketball.

“The minimal colour scheme of black and gray does not add sufficient creativity to the design,” it said.

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