U.S. Supreme Court, Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., Docket No. 20-915

Copyright

 

Registration Application

 

Inaccurate Information in a Registration

 

Copyright Infringement

 

Safe Harbor, Validity of Certificate of Registration

 

“Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse.”?

 

 

 

 

To obtain registration, the author of a work must submit to the Register of Copyrights a copy of the work and an application. §§408, 409. The application must provide information about the work. §409. Some of this information is purely factual, but some of it incorporates legal conclusions. Ibid. If the Register determines that the work is copyrightable and meets other statutory requirements, she will issue a certificate of registration. §410(a). The information on this certificate reflects the information that the copyright holder provided on the application.Ibid.

 

Naturally, the information provided on the application for registration should be accurate. Nevertheless, the Copyright Act provides a safe harbor. It says that a certificate of registration is valid 

“regardless of whether the certificate contains any inaccurate information, unless— 

“(A) the inaccurate information was included on the application for copyright registration with knowledge that it was inaccurate; and 

“(B) the inaccuracy of the information, if known, would have caused the Register of Copyrights to refuse registration.” §411(b)(1) (emphasis added).

 

The important point for our purposes is that a certificate of registration is valid even though it contains inaccurate information, as long as the copyright holder lacked “knowledge that it was inaccurate.” §411(b)(1)(A).

 

The question before us concerns the scope of the phrase “with knowledge that it was inaccurate.” The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit believed that a copyright holder cannot benefit from the safe harbor and save its copyright registration from invalidation if its lack of knowledge stems from a failure to understand the law rather than a failure to understand the facts. In our view, however, §411(b) does not distinguish between a mistake of law and a mistake of fact. Lack of knowledge of either fact or law can excuse an inaccuracy in a copyright registration. We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals’ contrary holding.

 

Our reasons are straightforward. For one thing, we follow the text of the statute. See Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., 560 U. S. 242, 251 (2010). Section 411(b)(1) says that Unicolors’ registration is valid “regardless of whether the registration certificate contains any inaccurate information, unless . . . the inaccurate information was included on the application for copyright registration with knowledge that it was inaccurate.” Both case law and the dictionary tell us that “knowledge” has historically “meant and still means ‘the fact or condition of being aware of something.’” Intel Corp. Investment Policy Comm. v. Sulyma, 589 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 6) (quoting Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary 469 (1967)); see also Black’s Law Dictionary 888 (8th ed. 2004); New Oxford American Dictionary 938 (def. 2) (2d ed. 2005); Webster’s New College Dictionary 625 (3d ed. 2008).

 

Unicolors says that, when it submitted its registration application, it was not aware (as the Ninth Circuit would later hold) that the 31 designs it was registering together did not satisfy the “single unit of publication” requirement. If Unicolors was not aware of the legal requirement that rendered the information in its application inaccurate, it did not include that information in its application “with knowledge that it was inaccurate.” §411(b)(1)(A) (emphasis added). Nothing in the statutory language suggests that this straightforward conclusion should be any different simply because there was a mistake of law as opposed to a mistake of fact.

 

To the contrary, nearby statutory provisions help confirm that here “knowledge” refers to knowledge of the law as well as the facts. Registration applications call for information that requires both legal and factual knowledge. See, e.g., §409(4) (whether a work was made “for hire”); §409(8) (when and where the work was “published”); §409(9) (whether the work is “a compilation or derivative work”). Inaccurate information in a registration is therefore equally (or more) likely to arise from a mistake of law as a mistake of fact. That is especially true because applicants include novelists, poets, painters, designers, and others without legal training. Nothing in the statutory language suggests that Congress wanted to forgive those applicants’ factual but not their (often esoteric) legal mistakes.

 

Further, those who consider legislative history will find that history persuasive here. It indicates that Congress enacted §411(b) to make it easier, not more difficult, for nonlawyers to obtain valid copyright registrations. The House Report states that its purpose was to “improve intellectual property enforcement in the United States and abroad.” H. R. Rep. No. 110–617, p. 20 (2008). It did so in part by “eliminating loopholes that might prevent enforcement of otherwise validly registered copyrights.” Ibid. The Report specifically notes that some defendants in copyright infringement cases had “argued . . . that a mistake in the registration documents, such as checking the wrong box on the registration form, renders a registration invalid and thus forecloses the availability of statutory damages.” Id., at 24. Congress intended to deny infringers the ability to “exploit this potential loophole.” Ibid. Of course, an applicant for a copyright registration—especially one who is not a lawyer—might check the wrong box on the registration documents as a result of a legal, as well as a factual, error. Given this history, it would make no sense if §411(b) left copyright registrations exposed to invalidation based on applicants’ good-faith misunderstandings of the details of copyright law.

 

H&M also argues that our interpretation is foreclosed by the legal maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” See Brief for Respondent 41–43. This maxim “normally applies where a defendant has the requisite mental state in respect to the elements of a crime but claims to be unaware of the existence of a statute proscribing his conduct.” Rehaif v. United States, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 8) (internal quotation marks omitted). It does not apply in this civil case concerning the scope of a safe harbor that arises from ignorance of collateral legal requirements. See ibid.

 

 

 

(U.S. Supreme Court, Feb. 24, 2022, Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., Docket No. 20-915, J. Breyer)