SCOTUS Rules That an H&M Copyright Ruling Should Not Have Been Overturned
“No harm, no foul.” That was the message the U.S. Supreme Court delivered Feb. 24 in ruling that a copyright infringement verdict should not have been overturned because of inaccurate information in the copyright registration asserted. The Court’s 6-3 opinion vacates a Ninth Circuit decision that threw out an infringement verdict on the ground that the registrant should have known the law regarding filing multiple works within one registration, a practice referred to as group registrations.
In Unicolors Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz LP, a jury found that Unicolors’ fabric pattern copyrights were violated and the district court entered judgment for H&M to pay nearly $800,000 for selling jackets that infringed on Unicolors’ copyrights. H&M moved for judgment as a matter of law that Unicolor’s copyright registration was invalid because for group registrations, all works in the applications must be published “in the same unit of publication.” Unicolor released some of the garments containing the protected patterns to private customers, and released the others to the public at a different time. Thus, the asserted registration did not technically satisfy the requirements. The district court denied H&M’s motion and found that safe harbor provision of the Copyright Act allows for innocent mistakes of fact and law. In this case, Unicolor was not aware that all works in a group registration had to be published “in the same unit of publication.”
