The now-familiar logo American Airlines adopted in 2013 has been turned down again by the U.S. Copyright Office as not original or creative enough to get protection. The ruling came on an appeal of the previous rejection.
The official decision says that “A mere simplistic arrangement of non-protectable elements does not demonstrate the level of creativity necessary to warrant protection.” And you thought (at least American hoped so) that you could see an eagle’s head with shapes above and below representing wings, and the whole shape suggesting both an eagle in flight and one leg of capital A.
The airline has also trade-marked the logo, but that protection is not as broad, and does not extend to all the countries that recognize the international copyright conventions.
And if the diss quoted above were not enough, the Copyright Office’s consultant added “Further, use of the colors of the United States flag (red, white, and blue) are exceedingly common and do not lend themselves to arguments that the work’s design choices were especially creative… In any event, even if a bird motif were unusual in this context, the work falls below the threshold for creativity required by the Copyright Act.”
Maybe it’s time for American to go back to the “scissor eagle” design.
