Nobody’s perfect, including those registering for copyright.
But thanks to Nader Pazirandeh’s company Unicolors, which creates designs for use on textiles and garments, those who include inaccuracies in their copyright registrations have a better chance of enforcing them.
The US Supreme Court ruled in Unicolors v H&M in February that a lack of knowledge of either fact or law could excuse an inaccuracy in a registration.
The Copyright Office granted Unicolors a registration that comprised 31 separate designs in 2011. The company stated that all the designs were sold to the public at the same time.
But it emerged, when Pazirandeh’s company sued H&M, that some of the designs were sold to different customers at different times.
SCOTUS ruled that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was wrong to accept H&M’s argument that the registration should be invalidated because Unicolors had knowingly included inaccuracies in its application.
The high court claimed there was no intention to deceive the Copyright Office.
According to some counsel, the ruling was good for individual creators because it made it less likely for those creators to be punished for honest mistakes.
