Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P.

Unicolors v. H&M, decided February 24th, 2022. By a vote of six to three, in an opinion by Justice Breyer, the Supreme Court held that the safe harbor for inaccurate copyright registrations turns on the applicant's knowledge — and that the knowledge requirement covers mistakes of law just as it covers mistakes of fact. Here's the brief.

Unicolors owns copyrights in fabric designs. It registered thirty-one separate designs in a single application and later sued the clothing retailer H&M for infringement. A jury found for Unicolors.

H&M then asked for judgment as a matter of law, arguing that Unicolors' registration was invalid because it could not sue on an invalid registration. A Copyright Office regulation lets one application cover multiple works only if they were included in the same unit of publication. H&M argued Unicolors failed that requirement, because it had offered some of the thirty-one designs exclusively to certain customers while making the rest available to the general public.

The District Court denied the motion, reasoning that Unicolors did not know it had failed the single-unit requirement when it filed. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. It held the safe harbor excuses only good-faith mistakes of fact, not law — and because Unicolors knew the underlying facts, its ignorance of the law did not matter. The Supreme Court granted cert.

The question was the scope of the phrase "with knowledge that it was inaccurate."

Under the statute, an inaccuracy invalidates a registration only if two things are true: the applicant included it with knowledge that it was inaccurate, and the inaccuracy, if known, would have caused the Register of Copyrights to refuse registration. A separate provision directs the court, before invalidating, to ask the Register whether she would in fact have refused. The Ninth Circuit read the knowledge requirement to reach only factual mistakes. The question was whether that distinction exists in the text.

The Court held it does not.

The Court's reasons began with the text. "Knowledge," it explained, historically means the fact or condition of being aware of something — so the safe harbor asks what the applicant actually knew, not what a reasonable applicant should have known. Nearby provisions confirmed that "knowledge" here reaches the law as well as the facts: a registration application itself calls for legal conclusions, such as whether a work was made for hire or is a compilation. Applicants include novelists, poets, and designers without legal training, and nothing suggested Congress meant to forgive their factual but not their legal mistakes.

The Court added that where Congress wanted a lesser standard than actual knowledge, it said so elsewhere in the Act. Earlier cases had likewise held that inadvertent mistakes — many of them mistakes of law — did not invalidate registrations, and the legislative history showed Congress enacted the provision to make valid registration easier for non-lawyers, not harder. The Court noted that willful blindness may support a finding of actual knowledge, so applicants cannot simply claim ignorance.

Justice Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Alito, and joined in part by Justice Gorsuch. He would have dismissed the writ as improvidently granted, arguing that Unicolors had abandoned the fraud question on which the Court granted review and now pressed an actual-knowledge argument no court below had addressed.

Having rejected the Ninth Circuit's contrary holding, the Court vacated the judgment and remanded for further proceedings. Unicolors resolves a split over the reach of section 411(b)'s safe harbor. The rule is that a registration containing an inaccuracy is invalidated only where the applicant actually knew the information was inaccurate — and a good-faith misunderstanding of a legal requirement, no less than a factual error, falls within that protection. The Court rejected any distinction between mistakes of law and mistakes of fact, and it declined to read a should-have-known standard into a statute that speaks of knowledge. The Court framed Unicolors' error as one of labeling — knowing the facts, but misjudging the legal category they fell into — and held that such a mistake does not forfeit registration. The safe harbor thus applies to the poet and the sophisticated filer alike, subject to the Court's caution that willful blindness and circumstantial evidence can still establish actual knowledge.

Unicolors v. H&M, 595 U.S. 178, decided February 24th, 2022. I'm Kyle Coleman. Thanks for watching.