With the validity of a copyright registration at issue, the
The appeal to the Ninth Circuit arose from a copyright infringement action brought by Unicolors, a company that creates designs for use on textiles and garments, against the global fast-fashion retail giant,
The garment design that Unicolors claimed to be infringed by
In its examination of the "rarely disputed" issue of whether a copyright is properly registered, the Ninth Circuit found the district court's rationale for denying
Second, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the plain meaning of "single unit," under the Copyright Act's provision for the registration of a collection of published works as a single unit, requires that the registrant first published the works in a singular, bundled collection. Therefore, the Court explained that the district court further erred in concluding that Unicolors's application for copyright registration did not contain inaccuracies despite the inclusion of the company's own designated "confined designs," which, according to testimony and evidence in the proceeding, were sold separately and exclusively to individual customers and were not first sold together and at the same time with the rest of the works in the single unit registration.
With this underlying foundation, the Ninth Circuit held that once a defendant alleges that (1) a plaintiff's certificate of registration contains inaccurate information, (2) "the inaccurate information was included on the application for copyright registration" and (3) the inaccurate information was included on the application "with knowledge that it was inaccurate," a district court is required to submit a request to the Register of Copyrights "to advise the court whether the inaccurate information, if known, would have caused [it] to refuse registration." Accordingly, the Court reversed the entry of judgment and award of attorney's fees and remanded to the district court with instructions to submit an inquiry to the Register of Copyrights to assess the threshold question of the validity of Unicolors's asserted copyright registration before the dispute can proceed any further.
Originally published
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