## Facts

- OddzOn Products Incorporated created the “KOOSH ball,” a toy roughly spherical in shape and composed of hundreds of soft rubber filaments radiating from a central core.
- OddzOn designed the filament structure so the ball could be caught comfortably and with little bounce, making it easy to grasp when it contacted any part of a person’s hand.
- OddzOn applied to the U.S. Copyright Office to register the KOOSH ball as a “sculptural work,” seeking copyright protection as a way to deter imitation products.
- The Copyright Office examined the KOOSH ball multiple times and refused registration.
- The Office concluded that the KOOSH ball’s overall appearance was essentially a sphere—a familiar shape—and therefore did not contain sufficient original authorship for registration as a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work.
- OddzOn argued that the KOOSH ball’s distinctive configuration and “feel” supplied the creativity needed for protection.
- After exhausting administrative review within the Copyright Office, OddzOn sued the Register of Copyrights (Ralph Oman) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), claiming the refusal was arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.
- The case was resolved on summary judgment.

## Issues

1. Whether the Register of Copyrights’ refusal to register the KOOSH ball was arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion under the APA.
2. Whether the Copyright Office reasonably concluded that the KOOSH ball’s visual form—characterized as essentially a familiar spherical shape—lacked the minimal originality required for copyright registration.
3. Whether the ball’s tactile qualities and catchability were functional attributes of a useful article, rather than protectable authorship separate from utility.

## Decision

- The court granted summary judgment for the Register of Copyrights.
- The court held that the Copyright Office’s refusal to register the KOOSH ball was not arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion under the APA.
- The court accepted the Office’s determination that the KOOSH ball’s overall visual form was essentially a familiar shape and did not reflect enough original sculptural authorship to warrant registration.
- The court agreed that the ball’s claimed distinctive “feel” and graspability related to function and did not constitute protectable expression separable from the toy’s utilitarian design.

## Legal Principles

- Judicial review of the Register of Copyrights’ denial of registration proceeds under the APA, asking whether the agency acted arbitrarily, capriciously, or abused its discretion; the reviewing court does not decide registrability from scratch in the same way it would decide infringement.
- Copyright protection requires at least a minimal amount of original creative authorship; familiar or commonplace shapes, standing alone, may fail that threshold.
- Copyright does not extend to the functional or utilitarian aspects of a useful article; protection is available only for artistic features that can be identified separately from, and exist independently of, the article’s utilitarian aspects.
- Characteristics tied to how a product performs—such as tactile feel and ease of catching—are treated as functional when they are part of the product’s practical design rather than separable artistic expression.
- A court’s affirmance of the Copyright Office’s refusal to register under the APA does not, by itself, decide the full scope of rights that might be argued in a later infringement case on a different record.

## Conclusion

The District Court for the District of Columbia upheld the Register’s refusal to register OddzOn’s KOOSH ball, ruling on summary judgment that the Copyright Office acted within its APA-bounded discretion in treating the ball as essentially a familiar spherical form lacking sufficient original sculptural authorship and in treating the ball’s distinctive feel and graspability as functional features not protectable as separable expression.


OddzOn Products Inc. v. Oman, 16 U.S.P.Q.2d 1225 (1989)