A work must pass a threshold of originality in order to be copyrightable.

That said, it is possible that the threshold of originality is very low.

(134) In the remaining European countries, however, copyright imposed a fairly high threshold of originality to qualify for protection.

The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted.

However, the threshold of originality for works of applied art is set much higher, which often allows the use of company logos and similar icons, too.

Legal scholarship has attempted to summarise the Federal Supreme Court's jurisprudence on the threshold of originality as follows:

Another court case related to threshold of originality was the 2008 case Meshwerks v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A.

This is so because Geschmacksmuster (design patents) and Schriftzeichengesetz (typeface patents) are seen as lex specialis for applied art such that the threshold of originality must not be assumed low for them.

Other more fundamental boundaries of copyright are caused by thresholds of originality, a threshold below which objects cease to be copyrightable, the idea-expression dichotomy, the public domain and the effect of Crown copyright.

CCH Canadian Limited v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 SCR 339, is a landmark Supreme Court of Canada case that established the threshold of originality and the bounds of fair dealing in Canadian copyright law.

All "works" in the sense of the law, i.e. "creations of the mind, literary or artistic, that have an individual character" are automatically protected by copyright, irrespective of whether copyright is asserted or not, but provided that it passes the threshold of originality necessary to constitute a protected work.