The Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a significant copyright case between Unicolors Inc. (“Unicolors”) and H&M Mauritz LP (“H&M”). The Supreme Court’s decision on this case would resolve a current circuit split and provide consistency in how much scrutiny courts should apply to inaccuracies in copyright registrations when determining whether they should be invalidated.

Unicolors, a textile company based in Southern California, first sued H&M, the Swedish fashion forward giant retailer, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in April 2016. Unicolors claimed H&M infringed one of Unicolors’s registered copyrighted geometric patterns. The jury found H&M willfully infringed Unicolors’s registered copyrighted pattern and awarded over $800,000 in damages, attorney’s fees, and costs.

H&M appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, arguing that Unicolors did not have a valid copyright registration for that pattern. In support of this argument, H&M alleges that Unicolors included false information in its copyright application by alleging that 31 different designs in the single unit application were published together at the same time. In May 2020, the Ninth Circuit reversed the jury verdict and sent the case back to the district court to determine whether the registration would still be issued if the inaccurate information was known. The court also held that there is no intent-to-defraud requirement for a copyright registration to be invalidated.

Unicolors petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit decision regarding when copyright registrations should be invalidated based on inaccuracies in the registration. On June 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear Unicolors Inc.’s copyright lawsuit against H&M.