On a second appeal, Judge Ginsberg concluded that there was sufficient creativity in the graphical representations of a wall, a ball, and a paddle, as they looked and behaved in a way that was not standard or obvious.

The court established an "extremely low" level of creativity required for copyright, and Atari was finally granted their registration for Breakout.

[2] Jobs recruited friend Steve Wozniak to assist with the project,[3] developing the concept into Breakout (1976), after four days and four nights of hardware engineering.

[4] 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.

[14] Atari received a reply from the United States Copyright Office dated February 13, saying that there was "not enough original authorship to register a claim".

[15] By the end of 1987, Atari sought court review of the Copyright Office's decision, challenging it as "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law".

[17] The Copyright Office responded with a second refusal on April 30, 1990, writing that "the display screens both individually and as a whole simply lack sufficient creativity to make them registrable as audiovisual works".

[18] Writing again for the majority, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg granted Atari's appeal, holding that Breakout was a copyrightable work.

[17][18] During this legal dispute, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the question of how much originality is needed for a valid copyright registration, in the 1991 case Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.[17] The decision in Feist became central to the question of copyrightability, establishing that "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.

[18] 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.

[21] In 2017, Atari sued Nestle for using the likeness of Breakout in an ad, replacing the images of bricks with small Kit Kat bars.

[27] 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.

[15] After the first Atari v. Oman appeal, the Nebraska Law Review suggested that the courts had provided little guidance about the standard of creativity required for copyright protection.

[28] 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.

[30] 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.