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Readers might recall last month’s post concerning the US Copyright Office Review Board’s refusal to register UEFA’s Starball logo. This work was denied registration because it was not sufficiently original to sustain a claim for copyright]. On similar grounds, the Review Board has now delivered yet another blow – this time against Vodafone. Background Vodafone applied for registration of the Speechmark logo as a copyrighted work with the US Copyright Office back in 2016. The work is a two-dimensional artwork consisting of a red quotation mark with light shading, placed within a circle in various shades of grey and white. The quotation mark is placed in the centre within a red square: The Speechmark logo was initially denied registration in 2017. The Office found that the work did not contain a sufficient amount of original and creative graphic or artistic authorship to support a copyright registration. Furthermore, the circle and the apostrophe (the Office took the view that ...

Although the World Cup is over, this Kat can’t keep his mind off thinking about MORE football … or soccer (as Americans call it). In 2016, the Union des Associations Européennes de Footbal (UEFA) filed an application with the US Copyright Office to have the famous Starball logo registered as a copyright work of two-dimensional visual art. The Starball logo is composed of a round ball, made up of black stars, with white polygons in the negative space between the stars. The shapes are arranged into a circular space, with the outer stars curved to follow the circumference (see below). The US Copyright Office rejected the application. UEFA thus appealed the decision to the US Copyright Office Review Board (CORB), which however confirmed the prior assessment in a decision issued earlier this summer. UEFA set forward a number of claims in its Second Request for Reconsideration for Refusal to Register. First, it claimed that the work was sufficiently creative (original) due to the logo’s co...