3 Count: Supreme Pattern

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1: H&M Sweater Spat Heads to High Court

First off today, Alexandra Jones at Courthouse News Service reports that The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to take up the case between H&M and Unicolors and may help answer questions regarding the role of a valid copyright notice in a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Unicolors sued H&M alleging that the retailer had infringed the design of one of their patterns. In the lower court, a jury found in favor of Unicolors and awarded them $850,000 in damages. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling after H&M appealed. According to the Appeals Court, Unicolors improperly registered the pattern in a group registration, which made the registration invalid.

The Appeals Court then remanded the case to the lower court to confer with the U.S. Copyright Office about the validity of the registration. However, Unicolors asked the Supreme Court to take up the case and it has agreed. It will weigh whether the the Ninth Circuit was right in requesting a U.S. Copyright Office referral in the matter since there was no evidence that Unicolors misfiled the registration knowingly.

2: Movie Studios Broaden Scope and Sue VPN Hosting Companies in Piracy Lawsuits

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that various movie companies have joined forces to file a lawsuit against the hosting provider Leaseweb and several VPN services over allegations that they are aiding piracy of their films.

According to the complaint, the companies allege that they have sent over 32,000 takedown notices to Leaseweb over piracy on its network but that the company has refused to take any action beyond forwarding the complaints to their customers. Those customers, according to the complaint, includes various VPN services that enable and protect suspected infringers.

The complaint alleges that, due to the lack of a policy for handling “repeat infringers” Leaseweb is liable for the copyright infringements that take place on its network. The lawsuit is seeking both damages, an injunction that requires Leaseweb to block normal BitTorrent ports and require the company to terminate repeat infringers.

3: Apple sued by of ‘ShutterCount’ App Developer for Copyright Infringement

Finally today, Jack Purcher at Patently Apple reports that DIRE Studio, the developers of an app named ShutterCount, has filed lawsuit against Apple alleging that Apple failed to remove an infringing app from their app store.

The lawsuit alleges that they discovered a Russian app named Pavlikhin was using some of their code without permission. As such, they sent Apple a takedown notice against the app, but Apple never removed it from the store.

According to DIRE, this resulted in significant damage to them. As such, they are seeking statutory damages and an injunction requiring Apple to remove that allegedly infringing app.

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