Register’s opinion needed to determine validity of textile designer’s “single-unit registration” for 31 separate designs that were not released at the same time.
In a case in which textile designer Unicolors, Inc., obtained a jury verdict against retailer H&M for copyright infringement involving designs printed on garments, the Ninth Circuit has reversed and remanded, ordering the lower court to go to the Register of Copyrights for a determination whether the inaccurate information that Unicolors supplied in its registration application would have changed the decision to issue the registration. The case raised for the first time in the Ninth Circuit what it means to publish multiple works as a “single unit.” The Ninth Circuit concluded that it means “that the registrant first published the collection of works in a singular, bundled collection” (Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., May 29, 2020, Bea, C).
Case date: 29 May 2020
Case number: No. 18-56253
Court: United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
________________________
To make sure you do not miss out on regular updates from the Kluwer Copyright Blog, please subscribe here.
