What the Supreme Court Unicolors’ Ruling Means

Today, the United States Supreme Court handed down what will likely be one of the most important copyright verdicts in some time as it ruled 6-3 in favor of Unicolors in their long-running dispute against H&M.

The dispute centers around a series of alleged infringements by H&M. According to the lawsuit, Unicolors created and registered a copyright in a pattern that H&M used when creating multiple products.

This prompted Unicolors to file a copyright infringement lawsuit and, initially, they were victorious, with a jury in the lower court ruling in their favor and awarding them $800,000 in damages.

However, H&M felt that there was an error in Unicolors’ copyright registration. According to H&M, the registration was invalid as Unicolors registered the work as part of a collection when it should have been a separate registration. 

Since a valid copyright registration is required for a copyright infringement lawsuit, this prompted H&M to appeal the decision, and the Ninth Circuit overturned the lower court’s verdict on those grounds. That, in turn, prompted Unicolors to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court took the case and heard it in October and, in a decision published today, the court ruled 6-3 to overturn the Ninth Circuit’s decision. 

According to the Supreme Court, innocent mistakes in copyright registrations, whether they are matters of fact or law, can be excused. The court found that, for an error in a registration to invalidate it, the filer would have to have  “actual knowledge” that it was wrong.

The majority opinion found that the legislative history of the Copyright Act did not indicate that Congress wanted good-faith errors to cause registrations to become invalid, whether those errors were in issues of fact or issues of law.

This, in turn, restores the jury verdict and sends the case back to the lower courts for more discussion on damages and other issues.

Why This Case is Important

On the surface, this case seems like a very niche copyright issue. Unicolors made a simple but ultimately pedantic mistake in a copyright registration that nearly cost them a significant judgment they had won at the district court level.

However, the issue actually touches on a very core part of copyright in the United States, and the ruling is exceptionally important for any rightsholders that work and operate within the country.

If you are a U.S.-based rightsholder, a copyright registration is required before filing a lawsuit for copyright infringement. It is worth noting that the United States is the only country with this requirement, that it unfairly burdens small copyright holders and punishes those unaware of the requirement. That said, it is still the law.

However, that law came with something of a landmine. It is, or at least was, possible for a rightsholder to file for a registration to the best of their ability, receive a registration certificate from the U.S. Copyright Office and then have that registration invalidated when an actual copyright infringement lawsuit begins.

Given the difficulties and complexities of filing a registration, this was not a theoretical issue. For example, the U.S. Copyright Office didn’t even have a system for registering blogs until 2020. Were blogs registered before, then registered properly? It depends. There were numerous approaches for doing it, and it’s impossible to say, without a court ruling, which were valid.

However, this ruling makes it much more difficult for someone challenging a copyright registration to invalidate it. The Unicolors case means that, innocent mistakes, whether they were mistakes of fact or law, do not invalidate a registration. This should be a cause for rightsholders, large and small, to celebrate.

This decision by the Supreme Court largely removes one of the greatest perils rightsholders face when pursuing a copyright infringement claim. While it may still seem to be a small victory, there are a lot of rightsholders breathing a sigh of relief as they are no longer worried they may have made some esoteric mistake in their registrations and invalidated them all.

Bottom Line

Obviously, I would strongly prefer that there be no registration requirement. Simply the act of having one creates barriers to legal copyright protection, and the burden of those barriers are felt very unevenly among creators and rightsholders.

However, if we have to have such an archaic and confusing system, the least it could do is not punish people for innocent mistakes. 

This takes a lot of the potential fear and headache from the system away. It is now much more difficult for a completed registration to be invalidated later, especially over innocent mistakes.

While this doesn’t protect those that knowingly lie to the Copyright Office (as it shouldn’t), those that file their registrations in good faith have much less to stress over. 

To that end, the Supreme Court’s decision is very much a welcome one.