After five years of litigation, the battle between Unicolors, a California-based fabric design company, and H&M is still going strong. Now the United States Supreme Court has agreed to.
United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether an inaccuracy in Unicolors’ copyright registration invalidates its registration and thus a jury’s $1 million damages award in Unicolors’ favor.
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
On June 1, 2021, the Supreme Court granted certiorari on the question of whether Section 411(b) of the Copyright Act is intended to be a “fraud” statute that requires scienter for cancellation of a copyright registration. See Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., No. 20-915.
In 2008, Congress amended the Copyright Act to acknowledge the validity of copyright registrations that were based on applications with ministerial, nonmaterial errors.
See 17 U.S.C. Section 411(a). However, this “safe harbor” is tempered by Section 411(b), which leaves vulnerable to cancellation registrations that contain errors that would have been material to the Copyright Office’s decision to grant registration if the inaccuracy was known to the applicant. The statute also directs a court to request that the Register of Copyrights advise the court whether the inaccurate information, if known, would have caused the Register o
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
The Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) was signed into law on December 27, 2020, as part of the Omnibus COVID-19 Relief Bill. The CASE Act establishes a completely new forum for resolution of small copyright disputes, the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), in which parties may voluntarily resolve copyright disputes in front of a three-judge panel of officers appointed by the librarian of Congress. The CCB is intended to provide a streamlined and less expensive forum for small copyright disputes, with civil claims and counterclaims capped at $30,000 in actual or statutory damages. For example, an act of infringement of a single photograph may not always be worth the expense of a district court lawsuit; it could be resolved by the CCB instead.